Security information and event management (SIEM)

What is SIEM?

Security information and event management (SIEM) is a comprehensive cybersecurity solution that combines two critical security methodologies to provide advanced threat detection and security monitoring capabilities. Understanding what SIEM technology offers is essential for modern security operations.

SIEM for beginners

Both clients and service providers want ways to create a shared understanding of what the client-to-service-provider agreement is concerning reliability, quality assurance, and minimal guarantees.

As IT organizations grow, they deploy more hardware and applications that produce an ever-increasing volume of computer logs. Enterprise IT security consists of several different applications working in tandem to protect against various attacks. These include malware detection applications, a network intrusion detection system (NIDS), a network intrusion prevention system (NIPS), data loss protection, endpoint security applications, and more.

Each security application monitors a few specific types of security threats, but none provides 100% coverage. Your intrusion detection system can only read packets, protocols and IP addresses because it detects unauthorized users or suspicious packet activity on the network. Your endpoint security can only monitor files, usernames and hosts. Meanwhile, your service logs reveal user logins, service activities and configuration changes.

A SIEM tool acts as a management and integration layer that sits on top of your existing systems infrastructure and security software tools. A SIEM solution collects and integrates the computer-generated log data captured by each application, service, or security tool in the system, displaying the resulting data in a human-readable format and facilitating real-time threat detection and event management functions.

SIEM software tools connect the most important security data from the applications that protect your business, enabling your organization to respond more quickly to security events.

How do SIEM tools work?

Typical functions of a SIEM software tool include:

• Collecting, analyzing and presenting security-related data
• Real-time analysis of security alerts
• Logging security data and generating reports
• Identity and access management
• Log auditing and review
• Incident response and security operations

Modern SIEM platforms deliver superior incident response through these key capabilities:

• Data collection – SIEM tools aggregate event and system logs as well as security data from various sources and applications in one place.
• Correlation – SIEM tools use various correlation techniques to link bits of data with common attributes and help turn that data into actionable information for SecOps teams.
• Alerting – SIEM tools can be configured to automatically send a security alert to SecOps or IT teams when predefined signals or patterns are detected that might indicate a security event.
• Data retention – SIEM tools are designed to store large volumes of log data, ensuring that security teams can correlate data over time and perform forensic investigations into a security threat or cyberattack that may have initially gone undetected.
• Forensic analysis – SIEM tools make it easier for organizations to parse through logs that might have been created weeks or even months ago. Parsing, log normalization, and categorization are additional features of SIEM tools that make logs more searchable and help to enable forensic analysis, even when millions of log entries can sift through.

SIEM use cases

• Compliance management: SIEM solutions streamline compliance processes for organizations subject to data security regulations like PCI DSS. Security teams can monitor network access and verify no unauthorized access to sensitive data.
• Incident response – SIEM software tools play an important role in increasing the efficiency and timeliness of incident response activities. When a breach is detected, SecOps teams can use SIEM software to quickly identify how the attack breached enterprise security systems and what hosts or applications were affected by the breach. SIEM tools can even respond to these attacks through automated mechanisms.
• Vulnerability management – This is an ongoing process of proactively testing your network and IT infrastructure to detect and address possible entry points for cyber attacks. SIEM software tools are an important data source for discovering new vulnerabilities, along with network vulnerability testing, staff reports, and vendor announcements.
• Threat intelligence – This helps you analyze internal and external cyber threats that could affect your business. As cyber-attacks become more sophisticated, organizations must collaborate closely in their cybersecurity efforts to reduce their vulnerability to advanced persistent threats (APTs) and zero-day threats. SIEM software tools provide a framework for collecting and analyzing log data generated within your application stack, but SIEM tools can’t proactively discover external threats. Organizations can gather some of their threat intelligence from a SIEM software tool, but should also collaborate with others to proactively understand and address external threats.

The difference between SOAR and SIEM

Security orchestration automation response (SOAR) complements SIEM by automating response workflows and playbooks for the triage and remediation of security incidents. Both improve security posture, help accelerate decision-making, and work best in tandem to help security analysts reduce mean security incident response time and mean time to resolve (MTTR). SOAR uses machine learning to minimize human intervention, false positives, and alert fatigue.

The problem with traditional SIEMs

In the modern cloud-based computing environment, legacy traditional SIEM solutions often struggle with modern, microservices-based environments.  Legacy SIEM tools were more appropriate for monitoring the security status of large, monolithic applications and are no longer the best option for organizations securing their applications and IT infrastructure against cyber attackers. 

With microservices being started up and retired regularly, the rules-based alert system of SIEM tools cannot keep up. And it’s simply too time-consuming for manual monitoring.

The evolution beyond traditional SIEM

While traditional SIEM focused on log collection and compliance, today’s security landscape demands intelligent security operations, a new approach that transforms how security teams detect, investigate, and respond to threats. It incorporates logs-first unified telemetry, contextual enrichment and threat intelligence, as well as automation and AI/ML for a faster, smarter SIEM.

The future of SIEM is intelligent security operations

Organizations that previously depended on SIEM providers have now adopted cloud-based security analytics tools and threat intelligence platforms like Sumo Logic, which offers lower implementation costs, shorter time to deployment and a more sophisticated and modern approach to enterprise security and data analysis. 

As cyber threats evolve, SIEM technology continues advancing with:

• Enhanced machine learning capabilities
• Better cloud integration
• Improved user experience for security analysts
• Advanced threat intelligence integration
• Integration into a broader intelligent security operations framework

Get to know the future of threat defense.