It’s dangerous out there. Businesses are facing an ever-growing number of cyber threats that can compromise sensitive data and disrupt operations. As such, security information and event management (SIEM) systems continue to gain popularity amongst organizations looking to mitigate these risks in an automated fashion.
What is a SIEM? It’s a comprehensive, increasingly AI-powered system that analyzes logs, security alerts, and other data streams from security devices as well as applications and network hardware.
With such a robust (and often complex) system, it’s important to first understand how SIEMs can add value to your organization.
Security information and event management (SIEM) is a system that combines SIM (security information management) and SEM (security event management) to provide organizations with a comprehensive view of their information security. SIEM systems are sophisticated solutions designed to monitor and analyze security events across an organization's IT infrastructure.
These systems collect and correlate data from various sources—network devices, servers, applications, and security solutions, and more—to provide a centralized view of security operations. Using logged data, the SIEM system is then able to correlate all the other different data in real-time, providing information security professionals with highly specific and detailed alerts when threats are discovered, and prioritizing those threats or vulnerabilities by threat level.
Key features of SIEM systems that make them invaluable for compliance reporting include:
Log Collection and Management: Aggregating logs from disparate sources for analysis and reporting
Real-time Monitoring: Continuously monitoring security events to detect anomalies and potential threats
Correlation and Analysis: Combining data from multiple sources to identify and investigate security incidents
Reporting and Dashboards: Generating compliant reports and visual dashboards to enhance visibility and decision-making
Alerting and Notification: Promptly alerting security teams about potential compliance violations or suspicious activities.
SIEMs provide a ton of value to businesses, enhancing information security in a number of ways:
At its core, SIEM information technology systems help organizations to collect and analyze data from various sources in real-time. Businesses can monitor their entire network and IT estate continuously, thereby improving their ability to recognize suspicious activities and potential security threats as they happen.
SIEM systems offer several capabilities that significantly aid organizations in their compliance reporting efforts, including regimes such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and others. SIEM systems efficiently collect and normalize security data from various sources, ensuring comprehensive coverage of compliance-related events. By correlating this data, SIEM systems can identify patterns and generate reports that align with specific regulatory requirements.
SIEM systems also automate log management, monitoring, and auditing processes, reducing the manual effort required for compliance. Automation ensures that logs are consistently collected, retained, and archived according to regulatory standards.
Finally, SIEM systems provide continuous monitoring and real-time analysis, enabling organizations to detect and respond to compliance-related incidents promptly. This proactive approach helps maintain ongoing compliance and mitigates risks of non-compliance.
When there is a security incident, an organization’s ability to respond (or their lack of a response) can have significant consequences for a business. SIEM systems support highly-advanced incident management capabilities that enable businesses to detect, investigate and respond to security threats immediately.
SIEM systems excel in identifying potential threats before they can evolve into full-blown security incidents. By leveraging automated detection rules and anomaly detection algorithms, SIEM systems can flag unusual activities, such as unauthorized access attempts or data transfers.
Once a potential incident is detected, SIEM systems help in the swift identification and preliminary analysis of the event. The system correlates logs and alerts from different sources to provide a cohesive picture, allowing security teams to determine the nature and scope of the incident.
SIEM systems also play a critical role in orchestrating the incident response process, automating response capabilities (such as isolating affected systems or blocking malicious IP addresses) to enable quicker mitigation. Additionally, SIEM systems can facilitate communication and collaboration among incident response teams through centralized dashboards and workflows.
After an incident is contained, SIEM systems offer robust forensic capabilities to investigate the root cause, assess impact, and document findings. Detailed incident reports generated by SIEM systems are invaluable for compliance reporting, understanding the incident lifecycle, and improving future response strategies.
Cyber threats are always evolving. So countermeasures need to evolve too. Unless you continuously improve your organizations’ cybersecurity strategies, you increase the risk of falling victim to a malicious incursion.
The data aggregated by SIEM systems can act as a foundation for identifying trends, recurring issues, and gaps in security measures. By analyzing these insights, security teams can prioritize threats, refine security strategies, and allocate resources more effectively. And by applying advanced analytics and correlation capabilities to this data, SIEM systems can transform raw data into actionable threat intelligence. By implementing regular updates to threat detection rules and correlation logic, the SIEM system will remain agile and adept at identifying new and sophisticated threats.
SIEM systems also generate comprehensive reports that contain detailed incident analysis and reporting on post-incident review and future preparedness. Extensive historical data can also be leveraged to identify long-term security trends and recurring patterns. Organizations that continuously analyze this data can recognize persistent vulnerabilities and address systemic issues. This continual learning loop supports strategic improvements and informs proactive measures to fortify the cybersecurity posture.
SIEM systems use massive volumes of data to identify sophisticated threats, often in real-time. This can require significant human and compute resources. How do you assure the performance of your SIEM system, given the scale of the work it is doing?
Machine learning (ML) can help in a number of ways by automating SIEM functions. ML is particularly useful in the practice of anomaly detection by monitoring the typical actions of users, devices, and applications. A ML-enabled SIEM can flag significant deviations from baseline behavior and trigger an alert.
Machine learning models can also be trained to differentiate between benign and malicious activities more accurately,minimizing the instances of false positives and reducing alert fatigue. This allows security analysts to focus on genuine threats.
Cyber threats will never stop evolving—and the security measures in place to protect against them must be positioned for continued evolution as well. SIEM systems are designed to be highly-scalable to allow easy integration of an organization’s newly adopted security software or tools. With the flexibility to expand protection capabilities, businesses are better positioned to stay ahead of emerging threats.
SIEM cybersecurity systems can vary in size and type. A smaller SIEM system could be hosted on one server that performs all of the functions, while a larger system could include several types of servers like databases, archives and analysis.
Since most organizations have log data that varies by type and source, SIEM systems are often a combination of software (agents) on each device that generate logs, and agentless services that simply transfer data from sources to the SIEM server(s).
Regardless of your SIEM system architecture, there are some important features that you should keep in mind when selecting your SIEM.
The SIEM system should be able to integrate with and provide commands to other enterprise security controls such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and endpoint protection platforms. This enables the SIEM security system to do what it does best—analyze and then trigger other more specialized systems to stop attacks in-progress or prevent them altogether.
Most SIEM systems can ingest and analyze threat intelligence data that indicates which IP addresses, domains, websites, etc. are currently associated with malicious behavior. It is increasingly important for enterprise SIEM systems to receive up-to-date threat intelligence data to keep up with and be able to respond to these threats. However, not all SIEMs will allow for integration with the threat intelligence feeds preferred by an organization, and it’s important that it does.
By incorporating your organization’s ideal threat intelligence feeds into a SIEM system, you’re enhancing its ability to accurately detect the threats that are specific to your particular enterprise makeup.
Audits are a pain and can often catch an organization by surprise. It’s important that your potential SIEM comes equipped with advanced reporting features to help you demonstrate compliance during these tricky situations. You’ll want to consider:
Are you able to quickly generate detailed security incident reports?
How easy is it to pull reports on log data or user activities?
Do the built-in reports meet the needs of some common compliance data requests that you often see?
Can you generate new or custom-built reports as needed?
Asking these questions ahead of time will end up saving your compliance team a lot of effort in the long run if compliance features are available to use.
With built-in forensic features, organizations can simplify incident investigations and then better understand the root causes of these events. If your SIEM system captures additional information about security events, then that information can be useful for identifying attacks and investigating past incidents more thoroughly.
As well, the SIEM can automate the gathering of digital evidence. That evidence can later be used for disciplinary or prosecution purposes. Your potential SIEM should include comprehensive forensic tools that allow your security team to:
Analyze historical data
Reconstruct attack timelines
Identify the vulnerabilities that were exploited by attackers
Implementing a new SIEM system can be pretty complex. The following best practices, developed by the brave IT teams before you, can help to guide your SIEM implementation approach.
With your SIEM implementation, you should ensure that your organization can define clear policies for data collection, storage, and retention within the tool. Determine which data sources to monitor, as well as how long to retain logs, and how to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of collected data. This includes integration of relevant data from on-premises and cloud environments.
During implementation, you’ll want to ensure your SIEM is doing some of the heavy lifting when it comes to complying with regulatory standards. SIEM solutions should streamline compliance management through data collection and analysis. As such, it’s best to configure your SIEM systems to also automate compliance reporting and generate the necessary documentation to demonstrate adherence to the regulations relevant to your organization. By implementing pre-configured modules and reporting, you can make it much easier to manage compliance audits when they arise.
While a SIEM system will improve your overall security posture, there are going to be some inevitable tweaks and maintenance to keep it in tip-top, protective form. Fine tuning during initial implementation can go a long way to ensure the system remains effective for the long-run.
You should also consider processes to regularly review and update your organization’s SIEM configurations, which can be especially useful when you need to reflect changes in an IT environment, or to address an evolving threat. Consider refining correlation rules, adjusting alert thresholds, and incorporating new data sources as they become available to your security team.
Prepare your team to use this new tool, which is essential to maximizing its value. Consider hosting team training sessions during implementation, as well as on-going sessions throughout the year to refresh your security team’s knowledge and to onboard any new team members. Your team needs to be deeply familiar with the system and know how to use certain features effectively. This will better empower them to respond to security incidents appropriately and promptly when an incident occurs.
Despite the many benefits of a SIEM system, this robust tool also comes with its fair share of implementation hurdles to clear. Identifying these common challenges ahead of time can go a long way to ensure your team is prepared with solutions during implementation.
SIEM systems must process and analyze enormous amounts of data from a variety of sources, which can create a challenge with managing that data. To address this challenge, make sure your organization is already equipped with enough storage space and processing power to handle it all, because you will want to receive timely analysis and actionable insights from the system in real-time.
While this a big challenge to consider, the solution is all about how you filter events to be able to separate out and prioritize what is truly important.
It’s also a good practice to get clarity from the SIEM vendor about data charges. Some SIEM vendors charge by the volume of data the solution handles and stores. This can add up very quickly and become a big expense. You may have choices about which data you analyze, how long you store it, and so forth.
False alarms or false positives are another common SIEM implementation challenge. With improper installation and configuration, these false positives will alert your team to potential security incidents that are actually harmless or inconsequential. If you have too many false positives, your system can actually work against you by bogging down your security team with low-priority investigations. With this data bombardment, their ability to respond to actual, genuine threats becomes greatly reduced.
During implementation, make sure to set aside enough time (initially and on-going) to fine tune your SIEM with advanced analytics.
In order to choose the right SIEM solution for your business, you must first evaluate several critical factors.
When choosing your SIEM system, a key feature to look for is real-time analytics. This type of feature helps to detect, distinguish and prioritize events or activities that represent a threat, a compliance issue, or something else of interest to your users. This capability allows organizations to detect and respond to security incidents as they happen, minimizing potential damage and reducing the time to remediation.
Comprehensive feature administration capabilities enable organizations to customize and manage their security settings effectively. Consider choosing a system that allows your team to maintain and support complex functions like:
Configuring alerts
Defining correlation rules
Managing log and data sources
Managing user roles
Integrating with other security tools.
As with most software, your SIEM strategy is only going to be effective if your security team can use it efficiently. This can be particularly important if any of your users fall outside of the traditional IT team. Your SIEM should have an intuitive user interface and provide easy access to essential features and functionalities. Consider defining use cases for your SIEM that align with your organization’s security monitoring objectives, and then use those common use cases when considering the design requirements for your SIEM user interface.
Your SIEM system will generate a ton of new data that will require storage. Organizations should evaluate the SIEM solution's data storage capabilities, including its capacity, scalability, and support for data retention policies. Cloud-based storage solutions can typically scale to meet the needs of SIEM system data. Ensuring that the SIEM system can handle the organization's data volume and retention requirements.
Just like technology in general, cyber threats continue to evolve. As threats evolve, SIEM technology will continue to advance as well. There are several advancements and trends expected on the horizon.
In particular, future SIEM systems will likely incorporate more advanced AI and machine learning capabilities. AI and machine learning can help improve the accuracy of threat detection, reduce false positives, and provide deeper insights into security incidents.
With AI’s increasingly important role in SIEM solutions, organizations can expect future SIEMs to have improved decision-making capabilities, and the ability to adapt to the growth in endpoints. Incorporating more AI and machine learning capabilities is especially crucial considering the increased amount of data that future SIEM tools will most certainly need to consume.
As more organizations migrate to the cloud, SIEM systems will need to offer better integration with cloud services. This includes the ability to monitor and analyze security events across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
User behavior analytics (UBA) is becoming increasingly important for detecting insider threats and compromised accounts. Future SIEM systems will likely place a greater emphasis on UBA to identify abnormal user activities and potential security risks.
Rubrik offers a range of native solutions that integrate with and enhance your SIEM capabilities to improve your organization’s cyber resilience and protect it from cyber threats. In addition to native integrations, Rubrik’s event-driven framework supports industry-standard webhooks and the Rubrik Security Cloud GraphQL APIs.
Microsoft Sentinel and CrowdStrike LogScale integration - Rubrik integrates with Microsoft Sentinel and CrowdStrike LogScale to provide comprehensive threat detection and response capabilities. This integration allows organizations to leverage Rubrik's data protection and recovery features alongside advanced SIEM functionalities to provide data context directly into the SIEM.
Ransomware recovery - Rubriks’ ransomware recovery solutions integrate seamlessly with popular SIEM tools as well. With accelerated data restoration and recovery from ransomware, anomaly detection, and diagnosis of damage detection, Rubrik’s ransomware solutions can work directly with your SIEM to help with quick cyber recovery from ransomware attacks while minimizing downtime.
Data Security Command Center - Rubrik's Data Security Command Center provides a centralized platform for monitoring and managing data security. It offers real-time visibility into data protection status, compliance, and potential threats. Coupled with a SIEM system, organizations can ensure they’re able to quickly identify and mitigate data risks to stay well ahead of cyberthreats and data breaches.