With the rise of online commerce, digital marketing, online data storage and internet communication, big and small businesses should already know the importance of cybersecurity. Statistics report that more than 50% of cyberattacks happen every week to different companies worldwide. Inadequate cybersecurity precautions can increase the risk of a company losing its customers’ sensitive or confidential data and security breaches. For this reason, entrepreneurs and business owners from all industries must implement a robust security information and event (SIEM) strategy in their companies.
What Is SIEM?
SIEM is a technological security solution that provides a comprehensive view of all data and activities happening in an IT infrastructure. It monitors network activities and detects unusual or suspicious behaviours to mitigate cyberattacks. With many businesses expanding their IT systems and networks, new risks emerge with this upgrade. These risks often include potential breach compliance and increased susceptibility to cybercriminals.
You must have an efficient Security Operations Center (SOC) to implement SIEM technology in your organisation. The SOC is responsible for managing all the security monitoring and analysing the data gathered from the SIEM platform.
Suppose you don’t have a SOC on your side yet. You can work with services like Castra or any managed security operations agency that can work for your company. You’ll work with a team of experts who proactively monitors your business’ security 24/7, giving you peace of mind that your organisation and its highly sensitive data are always protected.
Both the SIEM and SOC are crucial to each other. Without SIEM, the SOC will have difficulty monitoring your company’s IT infrastructure. And without SOC, no experts will be there to analyse the data gathered from the SIEM tool.
What Are The Main Roles Of SIEM?
There’s a lot more to this cybersecurity solution than simply detecting abnormalities and suspicious activities in all your network applications. To learn more, here are the primary roles of SIEM that will significantly benefit your business:
1. Log Collection And Management
SIEM solutions will collect and analyse event data from different sources across your company’s network and IT infrastructure to gain better network visibility. SIEM analyses various applications, external and internal technologies, multiple cloud environments and even logs from different users in real time. This process makes it easier for the SOC or security experts to manage the company’s network flow from one centralised location.
This increase and improvement in network visibility also help reduce false positive alerts. All potential cyber threats and issues are catalogued according to their type, status and severity. This categorisation makes it easier for the security team to identify and review false and true security alerts.
2. Event Correlation and Analytics
Another role that SIEM plays in effective log analysis is employing event correlation, forensics and analytics. These processes are necessary to quickly detect cyberattacks and data breaches in real time and mitigate threats to business security. With this function, SIEM can eliminate the need for manual processes, significantly improving the IT security experts’ mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) against any cyberattack.
3. Incident Tracking and Security Alerts
SIEM’s centralised network management can be an efficient tool for incident tracking and security alerts. This solution enables security and IT experts to identify and track all entities across all connected applications, devices and users from one platform.
This tool also has customisable and predefined correlation rules where the management or business administrators can be alerted immediately in case of any cyberattack. This way, they can take the necessary actions before the threat worsens into more complicated and dangerous security issues.
For example, SIEM detected a potential cyber threat from one of your employees’ computers. Instead of manually checking the employee’s computer to run some security tests, the SIEM will automatically trigger the alert and employ security controls to stop the suspicious attack from progressing. This significantly minimises the time it takes for the security team to deal with the security concern.
Furthermore, SIEM’s incident management will help ensure that the compromised, corrupted, or attacked data/device will be quarantined, along with its malicious codes. This will prevent the cyberattack from spreading and attacking more devices, avoiding large-scale breaches.
Regardless of how small or big your organisation is, SIEM is highly effective in protecting your network from ever-evolving threats. Most importantly, your company can customise this solution to meet your business’s requirements.
4. Compliance Management and Reporting
Most organisations from different industries must report different forms of regulatory compliance. Since SIEM is an efficient tool for collecting and verifying various data from the company’s entire infrastructure, this makes SIEM a popular choice for retrieving compliance reports.
SIEM can produce real-time compliance reports for various compliance standards. It also reduces the hassle of the security team manually creating reports that are only at risk of inaccuracy.
Conclusion
SIEM allows businesses and organisations to protect their networks and IT infrastructures from various security challenges. Its comprehensive security surveillance and other major roles for your company make SIEM a worthy investment for your organisation.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Implementation
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