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Since the times I started my career in cybersec, the "single pane of glass" has been one of those holy grails. You know the dream, the imaginable heaven for cyber where we have one platform that has all the alerts, all the context, and automation for the response. Everything is just a click away.

Picture it: You put on your VR glasses and swipe over investigation cards. Next to you is sitting our AI robot that does all the heavy lifting, and we just push the big red button to say "malicious, crush it, burn it, later we will recover it." Okay, okay, I went too far with the imagination here. But yes, you get it. We all want a single pane of glass, and many vendors are trying to sell you one.

But if you ask yourself, what actually is a single pane of glass? How does it look? What does it do?

When I was at Adobe leading their Threat Intel and Threat Hunting programs, the CISO back then was Brad Arkin. He would ask me, "Filip, if I give you an unlimited budget, what would you do with it? What tool would you spend it on and why?" It was a good one. And I felt like I never had enough staff on my wish list. Why did I think that? Because I didn't know how to build the platform myself.

So now, it made me think... if I can build one now, how would it look?

And to be honest, I think there is no one solution that fits all. In my view, you need a solution that you can build on top of. Think of it like Legos, not a finished IKEA table. You need to build your own thing.

This edition is sponsored by Imperum

So if I'm building this platform, what do I actually want to see and do? For me, it boils down to a few key things.

First, I want to track my assets. And really, there are only two types of assets I care about: machines and identities.

It helps to think of it like a classic fortress, you know? A bit old school, but it works.

When you think like this, it gets simple. Everything bad that happens in your network happens to one of these two things. If you start here, everything else gets easier. Tagging every event with an asset_id and a user_id is the magic key.

Let's be clear: your SIEM is the brain of your SOC. It’s where the magic happens—correlation, alerting, and hunting. But what happens when you try to force-feed it every single raw log from every tool you own?

It gets slow. It gets expensive. And your analysts spend more time waiting for queries to finish than actually investigating threats.

This is where a security data lake comes in. Think of it as a massive, cheap storage unit for all your security data—the good, the bad, and the ugly. You keep everything, but you don't force your SIEM to chew on it all at once.

The trick is to put a smart pipeline in front of both. As data streams in, this pipeline does the dirty work first: it cleans up the data and tags it with a standard format.

The result? Your SIEM gets clean, pre-tagged data that’s ready for real-time analysis. It stays fast and focused on finding bad guys but can still pull years of historical logs from the data lake whenever you need to dig deep for a hunt.

You get the best of both worlds: a fast brain (your SIEM) and a perfect memory (your data lake).

Or you can pick one of the next-gen SIEMs that can do all of this for you.

Raw alerts are just noise. So, the platform needs to get all the context.

The best way is to build these as separate, small services. That way, your SOAR playbooks and your AI agents are calling the exact same enrichment tool. No more duplicate logic.

Now that you have alerts and context, you need to connect them. I want to combine multiple detections from the same or different sources in one place. And I want to do that based on those two assets: machines and identities.

For this, you need to mix old-school rules with new-school AI.

Okay, we have a correlated incident. Now what? I want to be able to do response actions from the same platform. And I need to track the outcomes.

Did that "isolate host" command actually work? Did the user account get disabled? You need a closed loop. The platform has to check and confirm that the action was completed.

And if I can also emulate attacks from the same place, it's just perfect. You know the DASEM loop (Detect → Analyze → Simulate → Evaluate → Mitigate). Use a Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) tool to run tests. See if your detections fire. This is how you find your blind spots before the bad guys do.

To make all this work, you can't just rely on automation playbooks. And you can't just rely on AI. You need both.

This sounds big, I know. But you start small.

Let's talk about a real-world problem. You buy into this "Lego" philosophy, you pick a great platform, but you hit a wall: APIs. Your platform is only as good as the tools it can talk to. What happens when a critical tool in your stack has a terrible API, or worse, no API at all?

This is where the true value of a platform is tested. A good platform doesn't just rely on pre-built connectors. It gives you the power to overcome these limitations. Look for capabilities like:

And this brings up another point: speed. In cybersecurity, things change fast. You might discover you need a new feature or a new type of analysis. The question you should ask any vendor is: "If I request a new feature today, how long until I see it?" A vendor that is truly a partner will have a rapid development cycle, often driven directly by customer requests. If you have to wait six months for a new feature, the attackers have already moved on.

At the end of the day, the "single pane of glass" isn't about finding the perfect tool. It's about changing your mindset. Stop looking for a magic box that will solve all your problems. It doesn't exist.

Instead, focus on building a platform that gives you a unified view of your assets and a flexible way to correlate data, add context, and take action. It's a journey, not a destination. You start with one small piece, one Lego block, and you build from there. You measure, you iterate, and you slowly create a system that is tailored to your specific environment and your specific risks.

That is the real single pane of glass. It's not a product you buy. It's a system you build.

This is the only way. You build it piece by piece, like Legos. That's how you get your real "single pane of glass." Not a magic box, but a command center that you built, that you trust, and that actually works for you.