A SIEM system, or Security Information and Event Management system, is an essential component of any cybersecurity plan. It gives you visibility into your whole IT environment and aids in threat protection.
However, SIEM can be a complicated solution that needs to be implemented and optimized by knowledgeable personnel. It is crucial to comprehend the main advantages of investing before making a decision.
Enhanced Recognition
And just what is SIEM, anyway? An effective tool for warning you about possible environmental risks is a SIEM. Additionally, it can assist you in fulfilling NERC, PCI, HIPAA, and PII compliance requirements. Correctly configuring a SIEM to match your network and environment is the best way to make the most of it.
Setting up the proper rules and thresholds to distinguish between typical and unusual network activity is part of fine-tuning your SIEM. Simple rules that link one event to another or more intricate correlations between various events—like a compromised login, a sizable file transfer, and a location change—can be used to achieve this.
These models can greatly increase your network’s visibility and identify a wide range of threats, including ones that exist beyond the perimeter, such as cloud-based attacks or remote user access to SaaS devices and applications. This enables your security team to prioritize the threats endangering your company and concentrate on the most serious incidents. By doing this, you can maximize the benefits of your SIEM and spend less time handling pointless alerts.
Decreased Negative Results
SIEM can generate an excessive number of false positive alerts if it is not properly configured and tuned to your organization’s specific security requirements. This may slow down analysts’ work and make it more difficult for them to identify and promptly address genuine threats.
This is especially true if configuration management data must be incorporated into the system’s solution. These annoying false positives are eliminated by UEBA, or user and entity behavior analytics, which first determines the normal activity in your environment before pointing out deviations from it.
Only properly configuring the rules—which requires some setup time so the solution knows what is typical for your environment—makes this possible. Proper configuration of these rules will allow the software to discriminate between real security events and false positives, which will prevent the software from raising unnecessary alarms. Enabling only the rules that are required for your environment is also crucial, since allowing all default rules can lead to alert fatigue. Mistakes like this are frequent.
Improved Adherence
You can keep an eye on all devices and applications, including those used by remote workers, from one central location by implementing a SIEM program. Compared to manually monitoring each device, this active monitoring can assist you in identifying and resolving cyberattacks much more quickly.
You can design unique rules, alerts, and dashboards with SIEM that are specific to your security requirements. This keeps your analysts from becoming overloaded with false positives and helps them obtain the information they need.
Additionally, a quality SIEM program will employ models as opposed to correlation rules, which increases the program’s ability to identify genuine threats and stop attackers from exploiting the system. In order for a model to generate an alert, several things need to happen, such as a user logging in from a different location or transferring a sizable amount of data.
SIEM solutions have many advantages, but they are labor-intensive to set up and maintain and call for skilled security teams and IT environments. By removing the hassle of setting up, maintaining, and keeping an eye on a SIEM platform, managed SIEM services can also save your company money by removing the need for you to make hardware and software purchases.
Increased Observation
Security teams can see a live, bird’s-eye perspective of their network’s activities with the help of a SIEM system. Blind spots are eliminated by this visibility, which greatly facilitates the detection and reaction to attacks.
As remote workforces and SaaS applications grow in popularity, businesses must be able to reduce risks wherever users access digital assets and services. By offering visibility into all network activity, irrespective of the device, application, or service the activity is connected to, a SIEM solution can assist in achieving this goal.
Reducing the amount of time needed to recognize threats and take appropriate action is another advantage of SIEM visibility. This holds great importance because an attack can inflict more damage the longer it remains undiscovered.
Certain next-generation SIEM solutions incorporate entity behavior analytics (UEBA) in addition to correlation rules, which automatically identify suspicious behavior patterns and notify the security team. This can be very helpful in identifying file integrity violations and DDoS attacks that might point to an active attacker.
Enhanced Protection
An SIEM system can reveal signs of a threat that might result in a breach when it is properly set up and adjusted to match your environment. This is made possible through correlation and analysis, allowing security staff to identify malicious activity promptly.
This is particularly crucial because a threat can do more harm the longer it remains undiscovered. Furthermore, a SIEM system speeds up the process of controlling an incident by allowing you to rapidly sort through massive volumes of data to identify what is and is not relevant.
Furthermore, UEBA (user and entity behavior analytics) and SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) capabilities are now commonly included in SIEM systems, transforming them into comprehensive tools that can defend your company against cyberattacks. When integrated with potent event correlation and sophisticated analytics, these solutions can greatly enhance IT security teams’ mean time to detection and mean time to response. They free up the time and resources required to handle the most serious threats by offloading manual workflows.
