How to Choose the Right SIEM Solution for Your Business?
Cyber threats have become increasingly frequent and dangerous over time. In fact, in 2022, attacks worldwide rose by 28% compared to 2021. Data breaches can be very costly for businesses. By 2025, it is predicted that cybercrime will cost companies around the world $10.5 trillion per year.
However, with an appropriate Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution, organizations can detect cyberattacks in real time or even before they occur and minimize potential threats. This blog will explore the importance and functions of a SIEM solution, as well as how to choose the ideal one for your business.
What is SIEM?
Before we begin, we must know what SIEM is.
SIEM stands for Security Information and Event Management. It is a software program that gathers and examines data from numerous sources throughout your IT infrastructure.
SIEM gathers security information from servers, network devices, domain controllers, and other sources. To find trends, identify threats, and allow businesses to look into them, SIEM stores, normalizes, aggregates, and applies analytics to that data.
Why Invest in SIEM?
Organizations should invest in an efficient SIEM because it eases managing security by prioritizing the security warnings the software creates and sifting enormous volumes of security data.
Organizations can identify incidents that might otherwise go unnoticed thanks to SIEM software. Furthermore, it can help a business determine the type of attack and how it will affect the operation. By automatically generating reports that incorporate all the security incidents that have been recorded across multiple sources, it can also assist a business in complying with regulatory requirements.
By allowing the company’s security team to discover the path an attack takes across the network, identify the compromised sources, and provide the automated tools to block the attacks in progress, a SIEM system also improves incident management.
Next-Gen SIEM Capabilities
As you know that SIEM is necessary for your organization; let’s go through its functions and capabilities in detail.
Log Collection and Processing
The proper configuration of log sources is essential for a SIEM solution. Your security team must confirm that their SIEM system is processing and archiving log data as planned after setup. A SIEM solution parses and normalizes log data as it enters in real time, preparing it for insightful analysis.
The capacity to seamlessly absorb any log data format is a feature of reasonable SIEM solutions. Log data continues to be aggregated when a SIEM solution becomes up and running. A perfect SIEM system enables log preservation with effective encryption methods and a fair compression ratio. This aids in the safe protection of compressed log data.
Searching and Reporting
To attain the highest level of security feasible, organizations must use both reactive and proactive security measures. Advanced analytics and threat intelligence capabilities are examples of proactive measures. On the other side, the reactive defense of an organization is built around searching and reporting capabilities.
The shortest amount of time should be required by an organization to identify a security event. With built-in analytical and correlation capabilities that enable it to identify attack patterns quickly, assets affected, and possible effects, a SIEM solution aids in the achievement of this goal.
Organizations are now required to report and record security incident mitigation. With thorough reports and data visualizations, an ideal SIEM system enables simple investigation.
Real-Time Monitoring and Threat Identification
A SIEM solution allows your security team to analyze and respond to security incidents in real time. SIEM solutions rely on event response systems, correlation engines, and analytical techniques. A SIEM solution comes with predefined rules to detect already known indicators of compromise (IOCs) and their behavior. As you become familiar with security incidents, you can fine-tune alert regulations to minimize the probability of false positives.
Event correlation supports real-time monitoring by establishing a relation between discrete anomalies. It needs contextual information about an organization’s IT infrastructures, such as devices, users, applications, and other systems. Threat intelligence feeds and access privileges information further enhance the accuracy of event correlation. Analytical features of a SIEM solution include a graphical user interface for accessing dashboards and reports, along with the ability to trigger alerts.
End-To-End Incident Management
One aspect of incident management is the detection of security incidents. The steps in the incident management process are:
- Recognizing a security incident
- Examining the discovered event
- Checking to see if it’s a false positive
- Choosing an individual or group of individuals to be in charge of solving the problem
- Taking action to lessen the incident
Your security staff will be assisted in managing incidents, from detection to mitigation, by an ideal SIEM solution. Workflows for incident response can also be automated by your team using next-generation SIEM solutions.
Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence (TI) feeds give your company knowledge about dangerous attack routes that could target your systems. Given that TI provides data from trustworthy sources, a SIEM system can now detect security issues that an organization was unaware of. In a perfect world, a SIEM solution would be able to:
- Support TI feeds from both open-source and for-profit service providers
- Use TI feeds for threat detection and event correlation
- Enable an Organization to Add Custom/In-House Threat Information
User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)
UEBA establishes a baseline of consistent activity within an organization’s network architecture. It detects deviations from baseline activities and highlights them for examination after receiving enough data. UEBA assists a company’s proactive strategy by foreseeing potential assaults. To establish a baseline for user activity over time, UEBA employs machine learning algorithms. Depending on their behavior, some SIEM solutions assign a risk score to each user on your network.
Factors to Consider While Choosing the Right SIEM Solution for Your Business
Investing in the best SIEM solution is very important. Companies may learn about assaults and risks in real time and attempt to prepare for them with the finest SIEM vendors. Moreover, it gets simpler to respond to any possible threats. The following is a list of some considerations when selecting a SIEM solution:
Correlating Security Incidents
To function with all the provided equations, the SIEM Solution must be able to recognize associated incidents. For example, if a brute force attack is attempted, SIEM can assist by identifying the logs and producing reports on the incident chain. This thus aids in the creation of strong notifications, helping businesses.
Forensic Capabilities
Forensic reports greatly aid the resolution of all breaches. Otherwise, none of the occurrences will be able to help with the incident; the SIEM system must have security integration. One factor that requires close consideration is forensics. When necessary, the SIEM must be capable of acting quickly.
Reporting
For all enterprises, having 24/7 monitoring with tailored reporting is beneficial. It can take a long time to generate every SIEM report manually; hence automation is always better. In each situation involving a security breach, reports must be created automatically. Several supporting data include:
- Service usage
- Network traffic
- Time series reports
Ability of Ingestions and Process Network Logs
Every network recording generates a large number of reports each day, making it challenging to keep track of them all. Any SIEM solution can potentially be retrofitted using new connectors and fresh data, but even that process is quite pricey. Therefore, the SIEM solution must be able to ingest and process log data independently. This is a crucial consideration when selecting a SIEM solution.
Maintaining Time for Doing Work
The key to advancement is ensuring your server restarts promptly if any incident causes it to go down. The company’s reputation suffers more damage the longer it takes to establish. The most excellent way to combat attacks is to find current solutions. As a result, your IT team needs to be fully informed of any recent developments in the SIEM solutions industry.
Easy Deployment
With the assistance of all other organizational departments, SIEM can function successfully. All other parties should cooperate in the deployment process. Intracompany support is made simpler by an easy deployment process. Making better use of resources makes it simpler for the business to select the ideal SIEM.
Managing Logs
When selecting SIEM, remember that it is preferred for managing logs from many sources and keeping them in one location. According to the needs of the security team and how they are operating, it needs upkeep.
Analytics Capabilities
The SIEM solution applies the right AI and tags to all log generations. Machine learning improves the capacity for learning in all circumstances and offers assistance with security analyses. It completes everything automatically, freeing up all engineers’ jobs.
Choosing NewEvol Next Generation SIEM Solutions
The NewEvol SIEM is a great security event manager that delivers actionable insights, assists businesses in promptly identifying threats, and continuously improves detection to strengthen your security team.
The NewEvol SIEM Platform provides a comprehensive security analytics solution on a single, integrated platform. With its efficient threat detection and response capabilities, this platform strengthens security operations and enhances collaboration among team members, technology, and processes. With SIEM information security, your team is always prepared to deal with any risks that may arise.
