SIEM: Bridging the Gap Between Data and Security Insights

Srikanth
7 Min Read
SIEM: Bridging the Gap Between Data and Security Insights 1

Living in the Information Age as we do, it seems as though more information is better than less. Generally, this is true, but if you have more information than you can reasonably handle and analyze, it doesn’t do you much good. While raw data is a great thing to have, you need to be able to make sense of it if you’re going to base business decisions and strategic operations on the data you’ve collected. This is where Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), a tool that streamlines some of that for you, comes in.

What is a SIEM?

A SIEM tool aggregates raw security data and presents it to security professionals in a way that facilitates quick responses to potential threats. Easy to understand, the reports prioritize high-risk security incidents and alert teams when an unusual event needs attention. An important component of a security operations center (SOC), SIEM collects event logs and monitors activity on and around your network.

SIEM tools have several functions that security professionals can leverage for actionable insights.

  • Data collection. There are no insights without data. When a potential security event occurs, the SIEM tool will log the information. Generally, the tool is connected to your devices on your network, either through an installed agent or by direct connection and log access, which enables it to pull this information from every endpoint.
  • Rule creation. SIEMs allow you to create definitions of typical and atypical activity, which will be used to inform alerts. Security teams and administrators can customize default rules to better suit their environment’s security needs and risk factors. When atypical activity occurs, the SIEM logs the incident.
  • Data consolidation. You don’t need to evaluate every single available data point. SIEMs consolidate data into categories and correlate events so that you can be aware of the big picture without being bogged down in the small ones. Analysis helps you to understand what each log may mean in the broader context of your environment.
  • Alerts. You and your security team likely see vast amounts of reports and data over the course of a day, making it difficult to tell which are highest-risk or most pressing. To solve this problem, SIEM notifies you when something needs to be addressed.

These functions improve your ability to respond to the things that need to be addressed the most, and they convert raw data to useful insights that you can use to better understand your security environment and risk factors. This empowers you to make more informed strategic decisions based on more focused inputs.

Moving from Data to Insights

Using a SIEM can help you ensure that you comply with industry-specific and government-instituted data privacy regulations. It provides full visibility into your entire infrastructure, from endpoints to SaaS solutions, and it ensures that you can access historical records of events and connect them to current trends if needed. While all of this information is both helpful and necessary, the critical advantage of a SIEM is that it provides insights and context in addition to the raw data, saving you time and helping you prioritize effectively.

Most security teams are overloaded with more data than they can handle due to the high numbers of reports, alerts, events, and activity notifications that come through nearly constantly. With so much unorganized information, it can be nearly impossible to categorize and organize. More importantly, it is difficult to know which events pose a serious security risk and which do not need to be addressed immediately.

SIEMs aggregate, normalize, and analyze data to extract useful insights from these large volumes of data. They provide security teams with both the notable events and the context in which they occurred, helping you make sense of the threats at your door. They will also provide diagnostics to help you see how your system is affected by the event, which can inform your response and facilitate decisions about what security measures you should be taking.

Maximizing SIEM Potential

SIEMs are a great asset to your security suite, but to maximize their potential, you need to integrate them with other tools and your security architecture. To ensure that the SIEM has the data that it needs, and insights are communicated to those who can use them, the tool needs to be able to communicate with all of your endpoints, your network, and your other tools.

Full integration has an added advantage. SIEMs can take information from various tools and devices and consolidate that data, which means all of your information and insights can be found in one place. Coordination is critical during attacks, so communication between all security tools is best. SIEMs facilitate this coordination, and they streamline communication to keep responses moving quickly.

Some advanced SIEMs have adopted machine learning, which is proving to be highly effective for improving detection and adaptation capabilities. If you’re going to choose to use SIEM as part of your security infrastructure, consider one that uses machine learning algorithms and automation.

Your security tools provide a wealth of valuable, raw data, but the way to get the most out of that data is to implement SIEM tools that can aggregate and begin analysis for you. Decreasing your manual workload will improve your ability to respond to threats, address vulnerabilities, and make decisions about security. It’s important to leverage all of the features offered by your SIEM, and once you do that, you will have a tool that is indispensable for helping you make sense of your security environment.

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