Benefits and Best Practices for Using a SIEM Solution

SIEM tools provide a range of benefits for businesses of all sizes, from compliance reporting to stopping attacks. SIEM software has become a valuable tool for MDR providers, which is why CyberMaxx has its own proprietary SIEM solution (MAXX SIEM).

The demand for SIEM solutions is expected to increase significantly in the next few years. The SIEM market is forecasted to grow at a compound annual rate of 25% as organizations invest in more sophisticated cyber security solutions. By 2025, the SIEM market is anticipated to grow to a size of $5.5B (Source).

Let’s dive deeper into the benefits and best practices of utilizing a SIEM tool.

SIEM Benefits

SIEM is beneficial to organizations because it can help filter out a large amount of security data and prioritize the security alerts that the software generates. With SIEM, incidents that may have gone unnoticed can be detected. This can help improve an organization’s overall security posture.

• Increased Efficiency: Apart from rapidly detecting and identifying security events, SIEM systems are able to collate event logs from multiple devices across networks. This feature allows staff members to more easily identify potential issues, check activity, and can accelerate file analysis time.
• Economic Investment: Because staff can undertake cloud-security measures more efficiently, they are able to dedicate more time to other aspects of their job. This is good for business – and will be a great money saver in the long term.
• Preventing Potential Security Breaches: Any security breaches to your business are detected quickly by the SIEM software. This data breach response can drastically minimize their negative impact – not only the financial damage a breach can cause but also the damage to the existing IT systems.A SIEM system provides more conclusive and effective handling of security breaches that enhance and protect a business.
• Reporting, Log collection, Analysis, and Retention: SIEM software is a combination of SEM and SIM. The combination of these two systems provides greater overall performance. The SEM system is able to centralize the interpretation and storage of logs, whilst the SIM system is able to collect data to be analyzed for reporting.
• Compliance: Furthermore, the SIEM system not only monitors threats and provides real-time security alerts, but it also increases IT compliance. A SIEM system is fully compliant with regulatory standards that require log monitoring and retention, such as PCI and HIPAA.

SIEM Best Practices

SIEM has proven itself to be a useful tool for helping to detect and remove threats, but some organizations have found it difficult to implement SIEM solutions because of the complexity of data ingestion from a variety of platforms and the large volume of data generated.

Keep these best practices in mind when implementing a SIEM (You can also use these best practices to formulate questions if managed SIEM is the solution):

• Understand The Risk: Using your organization’s risk analysis is a great way to understand the assets that will provide the biggest bang for your monitoring results. When scoping out your SIEM implementation:
  • Identify all of your compliance mandates
  • Catalog all your sensitive assets (this includes systems and data)
  • Gain an understanding of the logging capabilities of all in-scope systems
• Methodology Development: Develop a methodology for contextualizing or correlating data coming into the SIEM from all of the sources.
• End-user Management: Consider and develop a plan for how end-user devices will be managed. What risks do unmonitored systems bring to your SIEM architecture and how can monitoring be established to minimize the impact of BYOD devices.
• Bandwidth Requirements: Understand the additional bandwidth requirements for the SIEM implementation. This will include internet and possible intra-cloud bandwidth for data communications as well as human “bandwidth” in terms of the additional responsibilities placed on the IT security team.
• Tuning Requirements: Ensure that sufficient time is built into the implementation for baselining and tuning of the SIEM. Tuning is critical to reducing noise in the system which complicates analysis and in turn reduces false positives.

Conclusion

SIEMs are potentially highly valuable additions to a security portfolio. These platforms correlate security data feeds, enabling them to detect serious security incidents in time to take action helping to facilitate an effective, fast response by the SOC team.

At the same time, SIEM software can take significant time to set up and to adjust the alerts and responses. Embarking on a SIEM project represents a serious commitment of time and resources on the part of the security team. It should be undertaken with rigorous planning and realistic budgeting in order to ensure long-term success.
Evaluate your staffing plan and consider the value of outsourcing the management of your SIEM to an MDR.

Organizations like CyberMaxx have the experts and the infrastructure to deploy and monitor a SIEM solution on a 24x7x365 basis. Often, an outsourced solution brings the benefits of additional expertise as well as reduced cost.

CyberMaxx already has the people, processes, and technology and has implemented the MAXX SIEM platform for hundreds of customers over thousands of locations.