What is SIEM? Why is SIEM important than ever before?

For organizations, data security has become come crucial than ever before. With each passing day, IT environments within the organization are growing even more complex, distributed, and difficult to manage. As a result, the use of SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) technology has become more important in today’s digital-first era.

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In this article, we will discuss SIEM, the working of SIEM, and the reasons why SIEM is more important than ever before.

What Is SIEM?

SIEM or Security Information and Event Management tool is a software program that helps in aggregating and analyzing various activities from multiple sources across the organization’s IT infrastructure.

SIEM collects data from servers, network devices, domain controllers, and more. Security Information and Event Management stores, aggregates, normalizes, and applies analytics to the collected data for discovering trends and detecting threats to the organization. This enables the security team within the organization to investigate alerts for a potential data security breach.

How Does SIEM Work?

SIEM tool works by collecting event and log data generated through the organization’s security devices, applications, and host systems. All of this data is brought together into a single centralized platform. Moreover, SIEM gathers data from firewall logs, antivirus events, and other locations and then sorts the data into different categories.

SIEM serves two primary capabilities to the incident response team. First, reporting and forensics about security incidents, and second, offers alerts by analyzing data which matches certain rule set. For the security team, the SIEM provides the needed analysis at their fingertips so that the SOC team can evaluate data breaches with as much information as possible.

3 Reasons Why SIEM Is Important Than Ever Before

1. Operations Support

Along with the size of IT teams, the size and the complexity of today’s IT environment are growing exponentially. Operations within the organization are often divided into several groups: Security Operations Center, Network Operations Center, Desktop Team, Server Team, and many more, wherein all of these different teams have their own tools for monitoring and responding to events.

It is because of this reason, collaboration and information sharing become difficult within the distributed team environment. However, for efficient, cross-team collaboration, SIEM can help in pulling data from various systems into a single place.

2. Compliance

Certain regulations bind businesses. These regulations include HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and Sarbanes-Oxley. However, complying with these regulations can become a daunting task for organizations.

SIEM tools can help organizations comply with different regulations’ requirements directly and indirectly. For instance, almost all kinds of regulations require companies to have some log management. Therefore, SIEM provides a seamless way to deploy the log collection requirement easily and provides instant access to log data. Moreover, SIEM also offers audit support to ensure that certain requirements are met.

3. Threat Detection

One of the primary roles of SIEM tools is to help detect and prevent threats before they cause irreparable damage to the organization.

However, do not confuse yourself. SIEM helps in detecting the activity associated with the attack rather than the attack itself. For instance, a phishing attack using the zero-day exploit has a high likelihood of making it through the antivirus, spam filters, and firewalls and being opened by a target user. Security teams can configure the SIEM for detecting activity surrounding such an attack.

Source: eccouncil.org