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Everything You Need to Know About SIEM

By July 31, 2021No Comments12 min read
Security Information event management

Every organization should focus on creating a strong cybersecurity program. You can use KPIs to determine the quality of your cybersecurity program. The main Key performance indicators are Mean time to resolve (MTTR), mean time to respond (MTTR), and mean time to detect (MTTD). Your organization should focus on quickly detecting, responding, and resolving any IT security incident. This will ensure that you can minimize the impact of a cyberattack. Due to this, many companies are moving toward SIEM solutions. SIEM solutions can help you in solving this problem. In this article, we are going to discuss SIEM.

What is SIEM?

SIEM solutions will help you in the aggregation of security incidents. It will log data from multiple data sources. After that, these tools will apply analytics to the collected data. This will help your security professionals in dealing with real-time threats. Your IT security professionals can use this data for incident response management and audit preparation.

SIEM is just an advanced version of these security tools:

  • Security Event Management: Security event management tools aggregate data related to security events. This will include data from firewalls, anti-virus, and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) that you use for responding to events.
  • Security Information management: This tool will help you in storing data and analyzing the data. It will also provide reporting tools that will combine the threat intelligence reports and event log management.

Working of SIEM tools 

Cybersecurity is becoming more complex with time. Thus, cybersecurity tools are also evolving with time. The tools used to detect threats are becoming better with time. They are using AI and ML for detecting threats in your network. These tools look for anomalies in your network. The tools that respond to threats are also improving with time.

Advanced SIEM solutions will first collect all the historical data from your network. It will help you in real-time log management. Also, SIEM solutions will help you in threat intelligence. You can use it for identifying potential vulnerabilities and abnormal activity.

Organizations are also moving their data and applications to the cloud. Thus, it is important to ensure that you are protecting your cloud data. SIEM solutions will help you in aggregating this new data type. You can integrate SIEM with the following tools:

  • Managed Detection and Response or MDR: It will ensure that your outsourced or remote teams have access to your database and technologies. This will help you in enabling secure remote work.
  • Security orchestration and Automation or SOAR: SOAR will help you in responding to technologies. It will use the SIEM detection capabilities for finding threats in your network. After that, SOAR will help you in mitigating the threat quickly.
  • User and Entity Behavior Analytics or UEBA: This tool will help you in enabling machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). It will monitor how your employees are using and accessing resources. This will help UEBA in finding abnormal behaviors in your network. These abnormal behaviors can lead to theft or fraud. You can integrate this tool with SIEM for improving its efficiency.

SIEM tool will first collect information from all the sources. After that, it will prioritize the alerts according to their impact. This will help you in reducing the number of false cases or practices. Thus, it will improve the efficiency of your IT security team. They only need to investigate real cases.

Advantage of SIEM tools

SIEM is a big thing for organizations. You need to invest a lot of money and resources in managing it. However, the benefits of SIEM will easily compensate the cost if your organization is growing with time. Some of the main advantages of SIEM are:

  • Improve Security KPIs

SIEM tools will help you in aggregating all your data in a single secure location. This will provide better visibility to your security team. Thus, it will help you in improving your organization’s security posture. SIEM tools will help you in improving important metrics like time to detect, time to respond, and time to mitigate.

  • Better efficiency

Security teams spend a lot of time researching all the alerts. If these alarms are false, then your IT team will waste a lot of time. This will lead to lost productivity. You can save this by aggregating your data. SIEM tools will help you in finding a correlation between different data sets. They will also help you in reducing false positives. This will ensure that your IT team will spend most of their time researching legit cases only. Thus, your IT security team will become more efficient. They will spend their expertise and time and alerts that are important.

  • Cost savings

You don’t need to buy multiple SIEM licenses for your teams. Multiple teams can use the same SIEM tool. This will help you in reducing your operational costs. Your IT security team will use the SIEM for research and threat hunting. Similarly, your IT team can use it for troubleshooting and fixing problems. Your compliance team will use the SIEM tool for audit reporting. Most SMBs think that the SIEM tools are very costly. However, they provide the cross-functional capability to your business. If your business is growing with time, then you will easily recover all the costs.

SIEM Capabilities and Features

SIEM solutions will vary in their features. However, you should ensure that your SIEM tool is at least providing these features:

  1. Data aggregation

Your SIEM tool should aggregate and collect event log data. They should collect this log data from all the important systems.

It should collect security event data from all the sources like IDS, IPS, and DLP tools. Your VPNs will also generate a lot of data as most employees are working remotely. Thus, your SIEM tool should collect this data. It should also collect data from endpoint security solutions that you are using. This will include antimalware and antivirus tools. If you have set up honeypots, then it should collect data from honeypots also. This will help you in avoiding potential attacks.

It should also collect network logs from your routers, switches, WAN, and data transfers. If you are using a private cloud network, then it should collect data from your VPC also.

Your IT infrastructure will also generate a lot of log data. Thus, SIEM should collect data like configuration, network maps, owners, and location. It is also responsible for accessing and managing vulnerability reports.

All the applications that you are using will also generate a lot of data. SIEM will collect data from your databases, servers, web applications, cloud servers, and intranet applications. If you have a BYOD policy, then you should also collect data from your employee’s devices.

  1. Data normalization

Your SIEM tool can collect a huge amount of data from your network. However, this data is only useful if your SIEM tool can actually normalize the data. For example, suppose that you are running your applications on multi-cloud infrastructure. Your Azure and AWS deployments will generate different types of event logs. The data should be in the same format. Thus, your SIEM tool should normalize the data. After that, it can focus on comparing the data.

  1. Data correlation

Your SIEM tool will first collect data from multiple sources. After that, it will normalize the entire data set. This will ensure that the data is in the same format. After that, SIEM will try to find a correlation between your data. This will help you in finding patterns in your data. You can use these patterns for finding a security threat, incident, or vulnerability. SIEM needs to link various data and events. This will help SIEM in finding patterns in your network. For example, your IAM tool might show that someone has attempted too many account logins in a small time frame. However, you can’t deduce anything from this data. You can correlate with other data like the end-user device is infected with some malware. These two data sets can help you in finding malicious actions. You can stop attacks by combining these two data sets.

  1. Analytics

SIEM needs to the first correlation between your data. After that, it will help your security team in prioritizing their activities. It needs analytics in this step. The analytics provided by SIEM tools will help you in maturing your IT security program. Statistical models and big data will help you in tying the data together. It will provide visibility into various trends. You can use data analytics for finding abnormal activity in your network. The threat detection capability will depend on the analytics. If your SIEM tools can do robust analytics, then they will easily detect most threats.

  1. Alert

Organizations are using SIEM solutions for detecting threats in their network. This will help them in improving the response time. You should ensure that your SIEM tool can send alerts to your team. it can use email and security boards for sending alerts. Your SIEM tool should also integrate with your ticketing solutions and collaboration tools.

  1. Dashboards

The Security threat data is complex in nature. Due to this, organizations can sometimes lack visibility. It is difficult to bring all the data together. Thus, it is difficult to understand what is happening in your network. Dashboards will help you in solving this problem. It will provide visualizations to your security professionals. Thus, you can review the event data easily. Your IT security team can also see the patterns easily which are detected by the SIEM tool.

  1. Retention

It is difficult to detect security incidents. Sometimes it might take months to detect a security incident. There are various laws that require you to retain your data for some specified time period. This simply means that your IT security team needs access to all the historical data when they are doing forensic investigations. Your SIEM tool should provide all the data retention capabilities that your IT security team needs. This will help you in meeting your legal and research requirements.

  1. Compliance reporting

Every company needs to follow some security compliance. Hospitals need to follow HIPAA compliance as they are storing patient records. Financial institutions need to follow the PCI DSS compliance as they are storing financial data. If you are storing EU citizen’s data, then you need to follow the GDPR compliance. You need to conduct independent audits for staying compliant. Your SIEM solution should help you in generating reports. It should provide a single document to you. This will help you in reducing your audit costs.

Best SIEM tools 

Some of the most famous SIEM tools in the market are:

  • Splunk

Splunk is the best SIEM tool according to Gartner. It is a full on-premise Security Information and Event Management solution. You can use it for security monitoring. It also provides threat detection capabilities to its users. Thus, you can also use it for detecting threats in your network. You can integrate multiple cloud tools with Splunk.

  • IBM QRadar

This is another very popular tool. You can deploy it as a hardware application, software application, or virtual application. The deployment part will depend on your organization’s capacity and needs. You can integrate with various cloud tools to improve its threat detection capabilities.

  • LogRhytm

This is the best SIEM tool for SMBs. It is affordable when compared to other tools in this list. Also, it will help you in protecting your network from various threats.

How Bleuwire can help your business?

SBMs can’t afford the latest IT security tools. They don’t have enough IT budget to buy these latest security tools. Also, SMBs don’t have access to the best IT security talent. Thus, they should consider working with a good MSP like Bleuwire. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire can help you in solving this problem. You will get access to their best IT security team. They will also help you in monitoring your network for threats. This will ensure that you don’t need to worry about hiring in-house IT security employees for your business. Bleuwire will help you in securing your network from attackers. They will provide you access to the best IT security tools. Thus, you don’t need to worry about buying expensive IT security tools. If you need more information regarding IT security services, then you can contact Bleuwire.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™  services and solutions in how we can help your business.