What is SIEM? and How It Can Benefit for Business?

In today’s world, where almost every kind and size of business can be a victim of cyberattacks, it turns out to be of utmost importance to safeguard your business from such attacks. A breach depending upon the kind and size may cost the organization millions in revenue, brand reputation and productivity, etc. Though each passing day, security engineers are thriving very hard and giving continuous effort to improve cybersecurity, the defense is still on the weaker side than the attack.

There has never been a more critical time for businesses to implement comprehensive security solutions that can help them quickly identify, prioritize, and respond to malicious transactions in their environments. One of the crucial security approaches to defend and fight attacks is to identify and respond to security events in real-time to decrease the possibilities of damage. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Software allows security teams to keep on top of security alerts in real-time. SIEM makes the analysis easier by filtering huge amounts of system-generated logs and by prioritizing those alerts to make informed decisions for further action.

Security information and event management (SIEM) enables organizations to detect security incidents that otherwise may go undetected. It provides the capability of detection, analytics, and response to businesses. The platform collects and aggregates log data generated throughout the organization’s technology infrastructure, from endpoints systems, servers, applications to network and security devices such as firewalls and antivirus filters. Once collected, then the platform uses correlation rules and statistical algorithms to extract actionable information from system events and logs and send alerts to the appropriate cybersecurity expert teams or other designated stakeholders if analysis shows that an activity runs against predetermined rulesets and thus indicates a potential security issue.

A standard SIEM solution can be deployed in two deployment models; The first one is traditional where infra including all associated components is being hosted at the on-premise data center, and the second one is a software as a service deployed at public cloud infrastructure.

Following are some of the reasons explaining why an organization needs a SIEM solution:

1. Security Monitoring – Data and events generated by the organizational devices and applications are increasing at rapid speed and it is nearly impossible to manually browse through all events to make some sense out of it and have some visibility. SIEM solutions help in increasing the visibility in near-real-time, the organization is able to know about details that are crucial, like who logged into the company’s system, what is being accessed, and from which device depending upon the used cases configured
2. Log Management – SIEM differs from traditional log management software in the way it deals with the log files. While traditional Log Management software is used to store logs received from all the devices in the infra and requires intervention from the security team to perform the analysis, which can be a cumbersome task depending upon the type and count of logs received. SIEM performs the task of log parsing. In log parsing, data elements are extracted from raw log data. It enables SIEM software to correlate the logs received from all the devices and conduct analysis to identify and detect the malicious activities happening in the environment.
3. Detecting threats – A SIEM solution detects incidents that otherwise may go unnoticed. SIEM analyzes the logs gathered from all sources to detect the threats. By providing relatively close security event surveillance, automated alerting, and analysis of application or user activity, SIEM solutions can assist organizations in detecting both internal and external threats, such as Data Exfiltration, Advanced Persistent Threats, Command and Control Server Detection, Unusual insider behavior, and port scanning, etc.
4. Incident Response – SIEM can help an organization’s security team to track and realize if they are currently under a cyber-attack or security incident, trigger the alert to appropriate stakeholders, and initiate the action as well. For e.g. Instructing the perimeter firewall to block the malicious IP from where the communication is happening. Even if the incident is known to the organization, it may take multiple hours, sometimes days to gather and analyze the data to react to the incident, which can be devastating for the organization. SIEM helps in automating this correlation and analysis task.
5. Forensics – In the scenarios where an organization was unable to track the incident in real-time and a security incident has happened and it needs to be investigated. SIEM provides the capability of rich data in the auditable format to help the security team to identify the root cause, threat actors, and mitigations to prevent future breaches or incidents. It helps to demonstrate that the organization was acting in a good faith and was doing possible actions to prevent the attack or preserve the logs for forensics
6. Regulatory Compliance – While the main purpose of the SIEM solution is to improve the organization’s capability to detect and respond to threats. SIEM plays a crucial role in achieving and maintaining regulatory compliance as well. It helps in log storage and automation of certain reports required according to regulatory compliance, which otherwise needs to be created manually involving huge manual efforts by the security team. Most of the modern SIEM solutions provide the capability of monitoring and reporting necessary to meet the compliance requirements.
7. Increases efficiency of the Security Team– In todays world attacks are becoming much more sophisticated and for any security team to analyze the logs generated by all the devices is a very time-consuming and difficult task. SIEM solution helps in automating multiple tasks related to correlation, analysis, and reporting to minimize the involvement of the security team in the tedious manual activity and allows them to focus on other important areas to deliver the expected outcome. Thus, it helps in increasing the overall efficiency of the security team.

So, it is quite evident that implementing SIEM solutions can be beneficial in so many ways for any organization, and it can act as a business enabler to improve the business performance by many folds. SIEM deployment can help organizations to achieve the desired ROI. Should you have any questions or are planning to go for SIEM solution deployment, we advise you to consult top cybersecurity companies in India to start your security journey

Talk to our security consultant today!! We at Cybersec Knights help organizations with finding the right solution & proposing desired configurations, based on the client’s requirements.