What Is Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)?

Today’s cyber security landscape is excessively complex. On the one hand, you have networks distributed across multiclouds and hybrid cloud environments. On the other hand, you have dynamic endpoints connecting and disconnecting repeatedly. Add to this mix integrated tooling stacks that are mainly controlled by third-party entities, and you get very poor visibility.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) enables you to centralize security processes. These tools and practices help you regain visibility, as well as control, of your environments. In this article, you will learn how SIEM works, the evolution this type of cybertechnology has undergone, and what are the benefits of adopting SIEM.

What Is SIEM?

SIEM is a set of tools and processes used to increase the visibility and centralization of security data in a system. SIEM solutions are used by security teams to monitor system events, investigate possible threats, and measure system performance.

SIEM solutions are designed to allow teams to ingest event and log data from across diverse tools and components and aggregate it into a usable collection. Once collected, this data can be analyzed and correlated to help teams identify patterns and track activity through your system. SIEM analyses help teams detect threats in real-time, audit systems for compliance, and organize threat responses.

The Evolution of SIEM Security

SIEM has been around for a while and the technology has gradually evolved into the sophisticated solutions available today. During this evolution, it has gone through three main generations:

• First-generation—combined event and log management systems. These solutions were limited in the amount of data that could be processed and were only able to provide basic alerts and visualizations of data.
• Second-generation—included improvements designed to help handle big data. These solutions were able to correlate real-time events with data from historical logs and threat intelligence feeds.
• Third-generation—combine existing SIEM tools with user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and security automation and orchestration (SOAR). UEBA applies machine learning to detect behavioral differences in events. SOAR enables solutions to respond to threats according to pre-defined or AI directed procedures.

On-Premises vs Cloud-based SIEM Solutions

When adopting a SIEM solution, there are two main implementation options — cloud and on-premises.

On-premise SIEM
On-premise SIEM solutions are stand-alone solutions that you host on your own infrastructure. These solutions provide full control over your integrations and enable you to access data directly. This provides greater opportunities for solution customization and reduces the chance that your data is exposed to outsiders.

When implementing an on-premise solution, you are responsible for both solution and infrastructure maintenance and management. You are also typically responsible for configuration and setup, although many solutions do offer installation support.

Generally, on-premises systems are best for large organizations with substantial security resources and expertise. This ensures that teams are capable of devoting the time and resources necessary to operating a solution and applying insights gained from it.

Cloud-based SIEM
Cloud-based SIEM solutions are solutions that are either hosted in the cloud or that are offered as a self-hosted software as a service (SaaS). Both variations are becoming more popular as organizations look to move data and operations to cloud resources.

Cloud-based solutions are often faster to implement and easier to maintain than on-premises solutions, particularly if it is a SaaS SIEM solution. SaaS solutions take care of all maintenance for you, including updates and support. These solutions can also include managed services that enable you to outsource some of your monitoring and detection tasks.

This assistance provided by managed services can be particularly helpful to smaller teams that otherwise lack the resources or expertise to operate a SIEM solution effectively. These services can set up your solution for you and provide guidance and education for security teams to build in-house skills with minimal risk.
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Despite the above benefits, there are some downsides to cloud-based solutions. With a cloud-based SIEM, you do not have the same control over your data that you do with an on-premises solution. Rather, your data is at least partially controlled by your cloud host or service provider. Also, some managed services only provide you with a summary of your data rather than full access to raw data.

Another issue is that cloud-based services require an Internet connection to be functional. If you lose connectivity to your remote sites, you also lose the ability to monitor your systems or access analyses. This can put your resources at risk, particularly if connectivity is blocked as part of a larger attack.

Benefits of Adopting a SIEM Strategy

When you are developing or updating your organization’s larger security strategy, SIEM solutions can be a valuable inclusion. These tools can provide several benefits that individual tools cannot. These tools can also help you condense some of the maintenance and integrations that other tools require.

Some of the most significant benefits of SIEM include:

• Advanced threat detection—solutions can help you identify threats that are missed by other tools. By aggregating data from across your systems, SIEMs can evaluate data in context, enabling you to identify patterns of movement and behavior as opposed to individual events. This helps you more effectively investigate events and allows solutions to detect events that are not suspicious when viewed in isolation.
• Threat intelligence—you can use SIEM solutions to both ingest threat intelligence data and create new threat intelligence. Ingesting threat intelligence feeds helps ensure that your correlation and analysis engines can identify as many threats as effectively as possible. Easy visualization data helps you generate system-specific intelligence since you can see exactly how traffic is directed through your systems and where weak spots may exist.
• Compliance assessment and reporting—solutions provide the ability to audit system data and report on system events in real-time. This helps you ensure that compliance reports can be generated as needed and provides a historical record of events. It can also help you meet compliance regulations and address issues since you can set alerts to notify you if data is accessed or modified illegitimately.
• Faster response times—real-time alerting is a standard feature of SIEM solutions, ensuring that teams are notified immediately when a threat is detected. These solutions are also capable of prioritizing alerts according to risk level. This helps ensure that teams can allocate resources efficiently and respond to the most serious threats as quickly as possible.

Conclusion

The first generation of SIEM was a pretty basic centralization and alert tool. By adding SOAR and UEBA to the mix, today’s third-generation SIEM are now capable of offering much more than basic centralization. You can use SIEM for advanced threat detection, threat intelligence, and compliance assessment and reporting.

When available, you can also use real-time alerting to increase response times. Some SIEMs can be deployed on-premises, while other solutions are offered only as SaaS. You should take this into consideration when choosing a SIEM.

Another crucial consideration is compatibility. Before making a choice, you should ensure that the system of your choice is compatible with your existing tooling and your security and data compliance standards. Getting all of this information in advance can help you avoid future issues and overhead.