Security teams are drowning in telemetry but reacting too late. By the time traditional SIEMs surface a threat, attackers have often already moved. Abstract Security’s Shift Left for Detection flips the model, and pushes detection to the data stream itself, where it happens in real time, not hours later.
Aaron Shelmire, Chief Threat Research Officer and Co-Founder of Abstract Security told MSSP Alert, "Many SIEMs and XDR tools perform detection using saved searches that run after the data has been indexed. This often adds 5–15 minutes of delay before activity can be detected, sometimes it even adds up to an hour. This is like trying to stop a break-in by reviewing yesterday’s footage.”
That delay isn't just inconvenient, it creates a gap that attackers know how to exploit. “Fast-moving adversaries break out from the initial compromised user account or computer within 50 minutes,” Shelmire added. “If defenders are always 15 minutes behind, they’ll never be able to catch up. Our Shift Left approach arms defenders with a superpower by detecting malicious activity at the time of collection within seconds instead of minutes.”
Cutting Out the Middle Layer
This model delivers real-time correlation across cloud, endpoint, identity, and SaaS data sources, while reducing the volume of data that needs to be stored and processed later. That’s a key shift for security teams who are overpaying for ingestion and still struggling to catch threats early.
With detection-as-code capabilities delivered by Abstract’s ASTRO team, the platform allows DFIR workflows to run directly in the stream as well. That means incident response and investigation can start the second a threat is spotted without wading through static dashboards or waiting for enrichments to load.
“All organizations benefit from these approaches,” said Shelmire. “In-stream detections greatly improve the ability of security staff to react to security situations in real time. Capturing response actions as code allows sophisticated organizations to empower early-in-career security staff while providing documented processes to auditors. And this allows smaller groups to follow some of the same processes larger, more specialized teams have developed, democratizing incident response and digital forensics.”
Abstract claims this approach results in up to 70% reduction in SIEM ingestion, with detections firing four times faster. More importantly, the alerts carry sharper context, enabling leaner teams to triage with more confidence.
A Practical Path to Modernization
Unlike many security overhauls, Abstract’s Shift Left approach doesn’t require companies to rip out existing systems. It runs in parallel with what’s already in place, injecting speed and intelligence right at the source.
“Shifting Left benefits all security teams, those using existing SIEMs, MSSPs, MDR providers, and fully in-house teams,” Shelmire said. “By shifting detections from searches to real-time streaming, MSSPs can provide their clients with detection findings much quicker, enabling clients to take action, protect themselves, and limit the blast radius from intrusions before they break out of control.”
The integration also enhances existing investments. “Traditional SIEMs and users of the cloud-native SIEMs like Google SecOps, Azure Sentinel, and AWS Security Lake benefit from a true real-time detection engine sending findings into established data platforms,” Shelmire explained. “This both reduces the amount of data needed to feed those platforms and improves response times.”
For teams relying on those platforms, the timing gap is real. “Google SecOps’ fastest rules run 5 minutes after data ingest. Azure Sentinel’s rules run 5 to 15 minutes after data ingestion. And AWS Security Lake doesn’t have a built-in detection engine,” Shelmire added. “All of these platforms benefit from the use of Abstract’s data collection, filtering, reduction, and detection capabilities.”
