What is a SIEM and Why Do I Need It?

Cybersecurity is most definitely a key priority for all businesses across the world. The cyber threat landscape has changed significantly over the past five years, and hackers do not care whether you are a big or small company.

There are several cybersecurity products in the market, and so the selection process on what is optimal for you can be daunting. How do you ensure that what you are purchasing is the most suitable and cost-effective for your business? This is where you need to be innovative and understand your threats and what you need to secure. Once you can define this, you can then plan the cybersecurity solutions that you need.

The Cybersecurity solutions landscape is diverse, and your cybersecurity strategy will likely have numerous solutions. One of those must be a SIEM solution or SIEM service.

What is a SIEM?

The term SIEM is an acronym for Security Information and Event Management. The purpose of this solution is to detect, prevent, protect, and resolve any cyberattack. As part of this, the SIEM solution will be the central collation point for all security events and logs from every part of your infrastructure. The SIEM will be responsible for collecting all the raw security data from your infrastructure, including servers, switches, firewalls, proxies, wireless access points, end-user devices, smartphones, routers, and applications. The SIEM solution does not just become a log collector but essentially works as your threat detection service.

The SIEM solution actively collects, and trends information based on various data points and then applies some logic to determine any attack behaviour or network anomalies. Machine learning and automation play a crucial capability in the solution and enable the SIEM service to adapt to new threats and information.

The SIEM solution will be highly configurable in terms of management, monitoring, alerting, and reporting. Depending on the requirements, it will be able to report and execute automation tasks based on what has happened, what needs to happen next and who needs to be notified.

Why Do I Need a SIEM Solution for my Business?

We hope that the section previous gave you plausible reasons to review the need for a SIEM in your business.

The cyberattack landscape has changed, and the attacker is using a multitude of ways to infiltrate computer networks. Cyber-attack defences are no longer just about Firewalls at the edge and Antivirus on the endpoint devices. On the contrary, cyber-attack protection is now about data and trending based on behaviour and anomaly detection. To achieve this, you need to have a holistic view of what is happening across your iT Services and Infrastructure. IDS and IPS systems play a crucial part in the detection capability, but just alone, they are just another log collector. The key is to be able to centrally log and trend data and apply a level of intelligence against it to detect patterns and network anomalies.

Selecting a SIEM solution is a crucial way of managing your threat detection and management capability. The cost of deploying such systems can be relatively small when you compare it to the risk an attack poses to your business.

What are the benefits of a SIEM solution?

Detecting and responding to cyber-attacks or security events should be an integral part of your cybersecurity strategy. Cyber-threats take on many forms, and the latest trends suggest that hackers are resorting to the “long-game” where they infiltrate your networks and then monitor and exploit vulnerabilities until they have what they wanted. To detect this activity can prove challenging if it’s done as a point solution. It needs to be holistic and cover all aspects of the IT service to then be able to pick up on network behaviour. Here are some benefits of a SIEM

> Increased detection of network compromise
> Preventing potential security breaches
> Understanding how your network and systems communicate
> Detecting systems and security anomaly
> Reducing monitoring costs
> Better reporting, log aggregation and alerting.

We hope this article has provided you with the information you needed relating to SIEM solutions.

If you like the sound of the ‘hands-off’ experience and having your IT taken care of by highly trained professionals, we’d love to hear from you.

You can find us at www.teckgenius.co.uk, where you’ll discover our full range of services that help you leverage the power of technology whilst enjoying the cost-savings that it brings.

Call our friendly team of experts on 0345 314 2001 for a relaxed chat about how we can make all this happen for you. Our team is ready and waiting to help in any way they can.