As the current business landscape continues to expand and rely more on cloud infrastructure for operations and data management, so also does your vulnerability to cyber threats increase. Therefore, as a business owner, it is imperative that you start taking a more proactive approach toward cybersecurity. Regardless of the size of your organization, the value of a security solution that can preempt cyber attacks and give your Security Operations Center ample time to react before an identified attack can cripple your operations is immeasurable. SIEM is one such solution.
What is SIEM?
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a cybersecurity solution that aggregates and analyzes data and event logs in real-time to recognize potential cybersecurity threats before they can cripple your operations.
Using artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, SIEM solutions collect and analyze data across your entire organization, looking for abnormalities in user behavior, inconsistent data, or any other irregularities that might precede a threat. It also uses data from past events to normalize new data sets and identify known or previously encountered threats. Coupled with real-time monitoring and incident reporting capabilities, SIEM solutions provide a constant threat monitoring and management stack that makes it easy for your security team to head-off attacks or security breaches before they can happen.
Advantages of SIEM for Your Business
There are quite a few advantages to having a solution like SIEM as part of your security stack. Here are some of these advantages.
1. Quality security data:
SIEMs collate and aggregate data from a vast number of sources, at a volume that would be impossible for a human being to handle. By aggregating and normalizing the data from all these disparate sources, it provides an improved quality of data available to be used in your incident workflows. SIEM solutions also store these normalized data for reference in future event correlation workflows. Therefore, previously encountered threats can be easily identified and repelled when the SIEM comes across them again.
2. Real-time monitoring and threat detection:
The SIEM takes on the work of constantly monitoring your system, looking for anomalies or unusual activities. It trawls all the different parts of your system, collecting data and correlating them to identify related incidents that might indicative of a threat. For example, your operating system might log a sudden downtime while your firewall detects a suspicious login attempt. By correlating the data from these two separate events, the SIEM can then construct a threat assessment pathway to determine the correlation between the two incidents and the possibility of an attack. Once threats are detected, it creates security alerts for your security team, reducing the time needed for your team to respond to incidents.
3. Improved data visibility:
This is one of the biggest advantages of using a SIEM solution. Regardless of the size of your business, there are several different components and departments producing data in different formats. By aggregating and normalizing the data coming in from different sources in different formats, SIEM solutions help to eliminate data silos in your security stack and produce uniform data that can be used and compared across the organization. This improves data visibility significantly, making it easier for you to identify what is coming from where and how to respond to it.
4. Better compliance reporting:
Generating compliance reports, regardless of the size of your business or industry, is usually an exercise in frustration, requiring the individual collection of data from all your hosts and the aggregation of this data into a single report. With the centralized logging capabilities of SIEM, however, generating compliance reports becomes very easy. With the SIEM solution collecting, aggregating, and normalizing your data into a centralized location, you can save a lot of time and effort needed to generate your compliance reports. It also improves the accuracy of your reports, eliminating all aspects of human error that might happen with manual collection and normalization of data.
About ArmorPoint
ArmorPoint (www.armorpoint.com) is a managed cybersecurity solution that combines the three pillars of a robust cybersecurity program — people, processes, and technology – into a single solution. Designed by cybersecurity experts, ArmorPoint’s cloud-hosted SIEM technology and extended detection and response capabilities enable businesses to implement a highly effective, scalable cybersecurity program. ArmorPoint is developed and powered by Trapp Technology, a Phoenix-based IT managed services provider.
