What are the advantages of SIEM?


What Is SIEM (Security Incident and Event Management)?

The process of finding, monitoring, recording, and evaluating security events or incidents in a real- time IT environment is known as security incident and event management (SIEM). It delivers a centralized and comprehensive picture of an IT infrastructure's security situation.

Security information event management is another term for security incidents and event management.

Software, systems, appliances, or a combination of these components are used to deploy SIEM. There are six major characteristics of a SIEM system in general −

  • Retention − Keeping data for a long time so that more full data sets can make judgments.

  • Dashboards  A tool for analyzing (and visualizing) data to spot patterns, target behavior, or data that doesn't fit into a typical way.

  • Correlation − It is the process of grouping data into packets that are relevant, similar, and have similar characteristics. The goal is to transform data into useful information.

  • Alerting − When data is acquired or found that triggers particular responses, such as alerts or potential security issues, it is called alerting.

  • Specific protocols, such as notifications delivered to the dashboard, an automatic email, or a text message, can be activated by SIEM tools to inform users.

  • Data Aggregation − Once SIEM is installed, data can be gathered from various sources, including servers, networks, databases, software, and email systems. The aggregator acts as a consolidating resource before data is delivered to be correlated or retained.

  • Compliance:\ − In a SIEM, protocols can be set up to collect data automatically to comply with commercial, organizational, or government policies.

How does it work?

SIEM software gathers and aggregates log data collected throughout a company's entire IT infrastructure. There's something for everyone from cloud systems and applications to network and security equipment like firewalls and antivirus. The program identifies, categorizes, and analyzes incidents and occurrences. SIEM analytics provides numerous important business and management units with real-time alerts, dashboards, and reports. Modern SIEMs also use unsupervised machine learning to discover the acquired log data (User and Entity Behavior Analytics).

SIEM in the Future

As the utilization of mobile, cloud and IoT technology expands, SIEM's function in the corporate market will alter to meet and moderate enterprise needs. SIEM systems will adapt to collect and analyze new waves of data and manage recent security breaches as IoT technologies contain many endpoints that are vulnerable to cyber-attacks and as cloud growth transforms data management. This evolution accommodates various data kinds, and despite the ongoing upheavals in the business and cybersecurity markets, SIEM technologies are here to stay. SIEM will remain a constant for corporate security and should be considered a cornerstone by firms trying to manage risk reduction both now and in the future because it is capable of incremental improvements.

The Advantages of SIEM

We can't possibly cover all of SIEM's advantages in a single essay. A treatise of this length would be required even to touch the surface of such a topic. However, we can identify a few of the most common advantages businesses enjoy and use to ensure a secure network and a productive operation.

SIEM solutions, for example, combine threat monitoring and mitigation with log management at their heart. They gather information and prepare it for your IT security staff to analyze.

Aggregation of Data

Even in its most basic form, one of the main benefits of SIEM for enterprises is IT environment visibility.

SIEM's log management features provide visibility as a side consequence. In most cases, as an organization grows, it loses visibility in its network; the resulting increase in applications, databases, users, devices, and third parties creates "dark corners" in your environment.

Hackers prefer to take advantage of these dark spots in your network, which is unsurprising. They can use these to go through your traditional cybersecurity perimeter and threat detection. Hackers can gain a foothold in your network by using these dark places to launch lateral movement assaults, island hopping attacks, and dwelling threats. On the other hand, SIEM solutions allow your company to turn on the lights.

SIEM collects security event data from throughout the network and consolidates it into a single pane of glass. As a result, it exposes and draws information from previously hidden network regions, preventing hackers from hiding their malicious operations.

Normalization of Data

Of course, the information gathered from your IT environment might provide its own set of problems. One of SIEM's features, data standardization, comes into play here.

Consider the number of individual components that make up your IT environment: application, login port, database, and device. Each one generates unencrypted data monthly, probably in the terabytes. Collecting everything is a difficult task in and of itself. Each one, however, creates, formats, and distributes data in a very different way. It's a Sisyphean endeavor to make sense of it all and manually spot associated security events suggestive of a compromise.

SIEM solutions, fortunately, do more than collect data; they also standardize it. In other words, they reformat the data in whatever format you specify, providing for both consistency and easy correlation in your log management. Both your SIEM threat analysis processes and your human intelligence benefit from it. Normalization, of course, aids in meeting compliance requirements.

Security Alerting and Threat Detection

One of the essential features of SIEM in terms of cybersecurity is its threat detection and security alerting capabilities.

For starters, SIEM frequently connects your company's IT security staff to several threat intelligence feeds. These keep your company up to date on the most recent information on the evolution of cyber attacks and the most severe concerns that businesses like yours are facing. With this information, you can better protect your company from the most common digital attacks.

Additionally, after your SIEM system aggregates and normalizes the data, it can use security event correlation to analyze it for potential vulnerabilities. Abnormal activity in one section of the network may not indicate a breach, but strange activity in numerous network parts certainly does.

Many SIEM solutions also include threat monitoring, which allows them to identify cyber threats in real-time.

When your solution identifies a related security event, it might trigger an investigation by alerting your IT security team. This enables your team to concentrate on certain potential problem areas and determine whether your company has been hacked. They can then implement your incident response plan and mitigate the threat as rapidly as possible, minimizing the harm you sustain.

Data Storage

Of course, once you've compiled this information, you'll need to keep it safe. SIEM systems can help you store normalized data, organize it, and recover it quickly if needed, among other things.

Of course, this aids compliance—some information may be required to comply with specific mandates. SIEM can also assist you in configuring your data storage to prevent data breaches; many data breaches start with misconfigured data storage nodes that allow hackers to enter without resistance.

Updated on: 15-Mar-2022

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