Hacking is a frequent occurrence in organizations. There is a great role that choosing the right SIEM solution plays in this regard. With the use of the best SIEM solution, organizations can know about threats and attacks in real-time. This will ensure that they quickly take steps to try to prevent damage from happening.
What is SIEM?
SIEM, a solution that combines legacy tool stands for Security Information and Event Management. These tools include Security Event Management (SEM) and Security Information Management (SIM).
Known as a software solution, SIEM aggregates and analyzes activities across your entire IT infrastructure. The aggregation is from many different resources. In other words, SIEM collects security data from domain controllers, servers, and network devices.
It normalizes, stores, and applies analytics to the security data it collects. This enables it to detect threats, and discover trends to help organizations investigate alerts depending on the severity.
How SIEM Works
There are two capabilities that SIEM provides to an Incident Response team: reporting and investigating security incidents and analytics-based alerts that indicate a security issue.
What the SIEM software does to the log data generated from the entire IT infrastructure is collect and aggregate it. The data generated range from cloud systems and networks to applications and security devices such as antivirus and firewalls. The event and incident are then identified, categorized, and analyzed.
SIEM analytics is also helpful as it delivers dashboards, real-time alerts, and reports to critical management and business units. With modern SIEM tools, unsupervised machine learning is applied to detect anomalies in the collected log data.
Things To Keep in Mind While Choosing A SIEM Solution
With a SIEM solution, it is easy to react to potential threats. Threats can be detected within a short period. This is important as cyberattacks often happen out of the blue. There are many benefits to a SIEM solution and below are some things to keep in mind while choosing one.
1. Correlating security incidents
The SIEM solution best for your organization should be able to detect correlated incidents early. After which it can immediately work with all the given variables.
For example, SIEM can stop a brute force attack on your infrastructure by detecting the logs and reporting the sequence of the incident before it occurs. This will be helpful to your business and organization as high alerts are generated.
2. Trying for proof of concept
There are many kinds of security solutions and having a team to help in problem-solving for all capabilities is important. The SIEM solution tool used must have capabilities of managing and solving issues.
To get the best tool, try going for proof of concept. Ensure that the tool has the requirements your business need and that it is sufficient for you too.
3. Having forensic capabilities
Solving all kinds of breaches requires a detailed forensics report. SIEM solutions must be able to offer security integration. This is to ensure the success of preventing damage from happening.
Forensics is a parameter that requires great attention. Traditional SIEM solutions may fail to provide adequate security threat and intelligence but the SIEM you choose should be able to take action on time to prevent breaches.
4. Reporting
It is useful to have round-the-clock monitored and tailored reporting for all kinds of organizations. Automation is a great way to get this done as manually getting SIEM reports can be time-consuming.
The tool you choose should have the capabilities of generating multiple reports at once. In the case of data breaches, the report should be generated automatically. Examples of some supporting reports are time series reports, network traffic, and service usage, among others.
5. Maintaining time for doing work
Time is an important factor even in cybercrimes. Progress in an instance where an event shuts down your server is making sure that it comes back on as soon as possible. The faster it takes to set the system back up, the less damage it has on the reputation of your business.
Solving an attack in real-time is the best possible solution to the issue. SIEM as a solution is best at doing this to help IT professionals. To make it easier, your IT team should know about updates in SIEM solutions.
6. The ability to ingest and process network logs
The daily records for network loggings can be many. This causes keeping the records more difficult. They come in different sources and formats. With the use of new data and new connectors, you can retrofit any SIEM tool. However, it is a process that is quite expensive.
As a result, a SIEM solution should be capable of independently ingesting and processing data logs. This aspect is important when choosing a solution for your business.
7. Easy deployment
Other departments and units of an organization can help SIEM to run successfully. The process of deploying this solution should align with the requirements of all other people. Getting into intracompany support becomes easier with an easy deployment process.
Additionally, choosing the right SIEM solution for your company becomes easy when resources are better utilized.
8. Having analytics capabilities
SIEM solutions can generate logs using correct tags and AI. With machine learning, the ability to learn in all possible situations improves.
Machine learning also makes learning and providing support easy for security analysis. Everything is automatically done; thus, giving all engineers less work to do.
9. Managing logs
In the process of selecting a SIEM solution, ensure that it is adept at managing logs from multiple sources. This goes with it storing them in a centralized location.
The right SIEM solution needs maintenance per the requirement and work needs of your security team.
Conclusion
The heightened threat to security is one of the biggest challenges for many businesses. The best SIEM solution for your business plays a major role in the success and sustenance of your organization. Having the tips discussed will help you get the best solution for your business.
