SIEM or Security Information and Event Management

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is software that combines security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) to improve security awareness in an IT environment. Through the collection and analysis of real-time and historical security event data and sources, SIEM solutions improve threat detection, compliance, and security incident management.

Table of Contents

What Is SIEM and What Are Its Main Functions

siem for cyber security

SIEM or Security Information and Event Management solutions monitor an organization’s IT environment, conveying actionable intelligence and allowing security personnel to proactively address potential risks.

Through a centralized gathering and analysis of standardized security data drawn from a range of platforms, this programme delivers useful insights into potential security vulnerabilities. Consider it a lens that sharpens your vision of the overall picture, allowing you to focus your team’s efforts on the areas where they can have the biggest impact, safeguarding your company and your consumers against data breaches.

Any occurrence in an IT environment that has the potential to become a vulnerability or a sign that the environment has already been exploited is referred to as a security event. Unauthorized access, configuration changes, and unusual user activity are examples of such events. A SIEM aids in the interpretation of these events in order to determine which threats provide the greatest danger and how they should be prioritized.

SIEM software gathers and organizes log data from throughout the IT infrastructure, from cloud systems and applications to network and security devices like firewalls and antivirus. SIEM then locates, classifies, and analyses incidents and events. SIEM analytics provides numerous essential business and management units with real-time alerts, dashboards, and reports. Modern SIEMs also use unsupervised machine learning to discover anomalies in the collected log data (User and Entity Behavior Analytics).

In the digital economy, businesses must monitor and safeguard their data from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Your firm is likely to have more data to collect and analyze than ever before. As IT infrastructures converge towards hybrid deployments between cloud and on-prem, it is becoming increasingly necessary to have a central security solution to track behavior and crucial events as data volumes and complexity grow.

SOC teams thrive when they have less pressure to perform and they require transparency. Security analysts would have to go through millions of diverse and segregated data for each application and security source if they didn’t use SIEM. In brief, SIEM can help security analysts be more efficient and accurate in their investigations by speeding up the detection and reaction to cyber threats.

SIEM software improves the speed and accuracy of security incident response by allowing for centralized data gathering, classification, detection, correlation, and analysis. This enables real-time monitoring and troubleshooting of IT infrastructure easier for teams.

Security incidents, on the other hand, can overload analysts and Security Operation Centers (SOCs) due to the industry’s scarcity of competent people, leading to alert fatigue and a lack of clarity about how to prioritize the company’s security resources.

The Benefits of Using a SIEM System​

managed security service provider using siem tools

SIEMs aid in the efficient operation of the Security Operations Center (SOC). They make it possible to:

SOC analysts can quickly get a hold on what’s going on with a SIEM combing through millions of data points, using analysis templates to fast examine log and threat intelligence data, which can save time in responding to a security threat as well as the negative impact of a cyberattack. Security analysts would have to manually evaluate several security device logs and data sources, such as threat intel feeds, if they didn’t have a SIEM. It not only burns employees out, which is a major issue, but it also slows down the incident response process dramatically. You can set up your SIEM solution to respond to occurrences in real time, perhaps preventing data loss or worse.

SIEM technologies can use their large data sets to detect and identify risks with greater accuracy than individual security data streams could. They can also supplement security event data and provide important context to incident alerts. A SIEM, for example, can link a threat signature recorded in one log to a threat found in another log.

SIEMs collect and aggregate security data, making it easier to analyze and use in incident response procedures. This can also lead to a better understanding of the enterprise’s complete security landscape. In most cases, the SIEM also normalizes security. The many data streams entering into the SIEM have distinct formats and fields in their raw form. It hasn’t been normalized. Data about users collected from network logs, email servers, databases, and mobile devices, for example, could take many various forms. This makes data analysis and event correlation difficult. The SIEM can reformat the data so that incident analysts and response procedures can use it consistently. A related benefit is data storage. For extended analytics and reporting, the SIEM can store normalized security data. This could also aid in compliance.

The management and aggregation of SIEM logs makes it easy to gain a network picture. Given the complexity and diversity of modern networks, “black zones” are all too common. As a result, network management and security teams lose insight into what’s going on with databases, servers, devices, and third parties as the network grows. Hackers are on the lookout for black spots on networks. It allows them to mask persistent threats and travel across digital assets without being discovered. This danger is mitigated by SIEM, which collects security event data from throughout the network. It then stores and analyses the information in a central location. SIEM log analysis can, in a sense, cast a light on these dark corners.

Security data recording is generally required as a vital control by regulations and compliance frameworks such as HIPAA. SIEMs play this role by facilitating the attestation process by providing pre-defined compliance reporting templates that help to speed the compliance process.

FortiSIEM: 4PLUS Star Ratings for SIEM Tool in Gartner

man using siem system for security monitoring

FortiSIEM from Fortinet Malaysia is a next-generation SIEM tool with capabilities that no other SIEM on the market can match. The seven primary strengths of FortiSIEM position enterprises to handle the problems of network security, performance, and compliance in today’s and future environments.

The following are some of FortiSIEM’s primary capabilities:

  • Patented real-time analytics with pre-built reports for quickly detecting and remediating risks to network assets and compliance standards.
  • Asset and configuration discovery in real time for baseline mapping and continuous search for newly introduced elements to the network.
  • With features that enable FortiSIEM to ingest, analyze, report, and store hundreds of thousands of events per second, the rapid scale-out architecture ensures readiness for today and tomorrow.
  • Enterprises and service providers need multi-tenant architecture to generate unique physical and logical reporting domains.
  • An API solution that makes it simple to integrate with different security data sources. Hundreds of integrations are available right away.
  • The only NOC and SOC metrics that are cross-correlated in real time in the industry.
  • Actionable analytics for immediately identifying risks and their core causes, as well as dynamic dashboards that allow users to customise the reports that are most essential to them.
  • A user-friendly interface and a single pane of glass.

FAQs on Security Information and Event Management

A firewall only serves to protect. A SIEM identifies security breaches and gives the required information, allowing you to respond correctly and quickly recover. All log file data generated across your network is stored in the SIEM. You have the information you need for forensic analysis if a breach occurs.

Security Incident Event Management (SIEM) is a system that collects and analyses aggregated log data, as opposed to SOC (Security Operations Center). The Security Operations Center (SOC) is made up of people, processes, and technology that are designed to deal with security events discovered through SIEM log analysis.

SIEM is significant because it makes it easier for businesses to manage security by filtering large volumes of data and prioritizing security alerts generated by the programme.

Organizations can use SIEM software to detect incidents that might otherwise go unnoticed. The software looks at the log entries to see if there are any indications of suspicious activity. Furthermore, because the system collects data from several sources across the network, it can reconstruct the timeline of an assault, allowing a corporation to understand the nature of the attack and its financial impact.

A SIEM system can also assist a company in meeting compliance obligations by automatically providing reports that incorporate all of the documented security events from all of these sources. The organization would have to manually collect log data and generate reports if it didn’t have SIEM software.

A SIEM system also improves incident management by allowing a company’s security staff to trace an attack’s path across the network, identify compromised sources, and give automated capabilities to stop attacks in progress.

  • Data aggregation
  • Security data analytics (reports and dashboards)
  • Correlation and security event monitoring
  • Forensic analysis
  • Incident detection and response
  • Real-time event response or alerting console
  • Threat intelligence
  • User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA)
  • IT compliance management

Get the Right SIEM Solution for Your Business

Spectrum Edge’s SIEM solution is one of the most complete and integrated in the business. Spectrum Edge provides security solutions to help your company integrate security into its operations and thrive in the face of adversity.

Now is the time to visit the Spectrum Edge for more information on the newest cybersecurity strategies, trends, and insights from Spectrum Edge Security experts!!!