Ask most networks what happened on a given day and they'll answer honestly: everything. Every outbound connection, every blocked probe, every DNS lookup, every renewed lease. The problem was never a shortage of data. It's that "everything" and "what matters" look identical in a raw log file, and telling them apart is where the actual work is.
A firewall log doesn't know that the three failed connections to an unfamiliar IP in the middle of the night are more interesting than the ten thousand ordinary ones during the day. It just writes down what happened, in the order it happened, with no sense of which lines deserve a second look. That judgement has to come from somewhere else — usually a person, scrolling, tired, hoping the important line doesn't slide past at 2am.
Classification is the first win
Before anything clever happens, most of the value comes from just sorting traffic into buckets that mean something: allowed outbound, blocked outbound, blocked inbound. It sounds almost too simple to mention, but it's the difference between a log file and a starting point. Once traffic is classified, a human (or a second pass of tooling) can decide where to actually spend attention, instead of reading every line with equal seriousness.
Enrichment helps the same way. An IP address on its own tells you very little. The same IP with reverse DNS and ASN/provider data attached tells you whether you're looking at a known cloud provider, a residential ISP, or something that doesn't resolve to anything reassuring. None of this is exotic — it's context that was always knowable, just not attached to the line where you needed it.
Where it gets genuinely useful
The next step up is behavioural: not "what happened" but "does this look like the kind of thing that's happened before, and was fine — or not." Risk scoring and anomaly detection sit here. Done well, this doesn't replace judgement, it just points it in the right direction faster — narrowing ten thousand lines down to the twenty worth a human decision, rather than pretending a model can make the decision unsupervised.
That's the same principle behind most of what gets built under this roof, whatever the domain: compliance data, communication history, network traffic. The data is rarely the scarce resource. A structured way to see the shape of it — what's routine, what's not, what deserves a closer look — usually is.