MONITORING

The Importance of a SIEM

Data Aggregation
IT environment visibility constitutes one of the top benefits of SIEM for enterprises. Visibility is an important advantage of deploying a SIEM’s log management capabilities. Under normal circumstances, enterprises lose visibility in their network as they scale; the subsequent increase in applications, databases, users, device, and third-parties create “dark places” in your environment. 

Hackers love to take advantage of these dark places in a network. They can exploit them to bypass cybersecurity perimeters and threat detection. From these dark places, hackers can establish a foothold in your network for lateral movement attacks, island hopping attacks, and dwelling threats.

SIEM gathers security event information from the entire network, centralizing the data collection in a single-pane-of-glass. By extension, it uncovers and draws information from previously hidden spaces on the network, preventing hackers from concealing their malicious activities from view. 

Data Normalization 
Data collected from throughout your IT environment can present its own set of challenges. This is where one of the benefits of SIEM contributes: data normalization. 

Consider how many individuals components make up your IT environment—every application, login port, databases, and device. Each one generates plaintext data, possibly terabytes of it per month. Collecting all of it presents a challenge. In addition, each one also generates, formats, and sends data in profoundly different ways. Trying to make sense of it all and recognize correlated security events indicative of a breach manually is nearly impossible.

SIEM solutions not only collect data; they normalize it. They reformat the data in whatever format desired, not only allowing for consistency in your log management, but for easy correlation. It benefits both your SIEM threat analysis processes and your intelligence. Normalization also helps with compliance mandates. 

Compliance 
Compliance does not just benefit large enterprises. Virtually every business, in every industry, and of every size, requires the fulfillment of at least some regulatory mandates. The consequences of any enterprise failing to meet compliance mandates include loss of consumer confidence, loss of sales, and the legal costs of resolving lawsuits.   

Compliance has long been among the benefits of SIEM solutions. While compliance may not take the same precedence in modern next-gen SIEM solutions, compliance remains a critical benefit. 

SIEM solutions often provide out-of-the-box report templates for most compliance mandates. Additionally, SIEM solutions can use the data it collects to help fill those templates, saving your security team time and resources.  

SIEMs help enterprises patch their IT environments and help to regulate third-party access. Both could represent security holes and compliance failures if not properly secured.  

Threat Detection and Security Alerting 
One of the key benefits of SIEM in a cybersecurity context is its threat detection and security alerting capabilities.  SIEM often connects your enterprise and IT security team to multiple threat intelligence feeds. These keep enterprises up-to-date with the latest information on cyber attack evolution and the most pressing threats facing similar businesses.

After a SIEM solution aggregates and normalizes the data, it can analyze it for potential threats through security event correlation. Strange activity in one part of the network may not indicate a breach, but multiple strange activities certainly might. SIEM solutions possess threat monitoring, allowing detection of cyber attacks in real-time.

When a SIEM detects correlated security events, it sends your IT security team an alert prompting an investigation. This allows your team to focus their efforts on specific potential problem areas and discern whether your enterprise suffered a breach. From there, incident response plans can be activated and remediate the threat as quickly as possible, reducing damage.

Data Storage
Among the benefits of SIEM solutions, they can help you store the normalized data, organize it, and easily retrieve it if necessary. 

This helps with compliance—some information may become necessary to fulfill certain mandates. SIEM can help you configure data storage to prevent data breaches.