Despite what it is called, cybersecurity does a lot more than only solve concerns relating to digital security. It also helps to create efficiency in business processes while organizing job roles and functions within an enterprise network. It can also provide digital visibility and clarity and this is where it is proven as most essential.
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SIEM, as an example, is among the most important components of cybersecurity, offering a lot more than what most enterprises first believe. In many instances, enterprises associate SIEM with a reputation of high costs, ineffectualness, and complexity. Yet these issues, which most enterprises can typically solve themselves, do not even come close to the dramatic benefits they can offer enterprises.
Dismissing how important SIEM is, or making the mistake of delegating SIEM to an IT security department, often creates added long-term issues for a business’s optimal performance. In comparison, when engaging and embracing SIEM can result in enjoying some of the best benefits of SIEM.
Here is what we are talking about:
The Benefits Of SIEM
It makes sense that we cannot list every benefit of the SIEM tool in a single article. It would take thousands of words to try and even start scratching the surface. However, we can provide a list of the more popular advantages that enterprises use and enjoy to ensure more efficient business and secure networks.
For your context, SIEM solutions at its core combine remediation and threat monitoring with log management. They gather data and then compile everything for analysis by an IT security team.
Data Aggregation
In its basic form, IT environment visibility makes up among the top advantages of SIEM for enterprises.
Visibility is one of the side effects of SIEM’s log-management abilities. Under general circumstances, many enterprises tend to lose visibility when it comes to their networks when they scale. The increase in databases, applications, devices, third parties, and users end up creating “dark places” in the environment.
It comes as no surprise that hackers enjoy taking advantage of the “dark places” in a network. They often exploit these by bypassing legacy-cybersecurity perimeters along with threat detection. From the “dark places”, hackers are able to establish footholds in a network for dwelling threats, island-hopping attacks, and lateral-movement attacks.
Fortunately, SIEM solutions can allow these enterprises to “turn on the lights”. SIEM will collect security-event information across the network, followed by centralizing this data into one pane of glass. To explain this further, it draws and uncovers information from hidden places in the network, which will stop hackers from hiding any malicious activities.
Data Normalization
Obviously, any data collected throughout an IT environment is linked with its own challenges. This is also where SIEM can contribute to something known as data normalization.
Think about how many components are featured in an IT environment. This includes every login port, database, device, and login port. Each one of these is generating plaintext data, and this could add up to terabytes every month. The collection of all of this also presents its own challenges. However, each of these is also formatting, sending, and generating data in very different ways. Attempting to understand all of this and then recognize security events that correlate and indicate a breach using a manual method represents a mammoth task.
Fortunately, SIEM solutions will not only collect the data but also normalizes it. This means that it reformats the data into a format you need or want, which allows for consistency in log management as well as easy correlation. It benefits human intelligence and SIEM threat-analysis processes.
At the same time, normalization will also help when it comes to compliance mandates.
Compliance
Compliance is not just one of the benefits for large enterprises. Just about every company, in each industry of all sizes, will require fulfilling some type of regulatory mandate. The consequences relating to any of these businesses failing to match compliance mandates can include lost sales, consumer consequences, or even legal costs to resolve lawsuits.
Luckily, compliance is one of the main benefits relating to SIEM solutions. While compliance might not take similar precedence when it comes to next-gen, modern SIEM solutions, when it comes to compliance it is still one of the most vital benefits.
SIEM solutions can often offer out-of-the-box report templates when it comes to the majority of compliance mandates like HIPAA. In addition, the SIEM solutions that you choose will use the collected data to assist you in filling these templates, which can save your IT security team resources and time.
More specifically, through its capabilities of helping firms to maintain compliance, SIEM can help enterprises to patch their IT environments while helping to regulate any third-party access. Both of these often represent compliance failures and security holes when not correctly secured.
Security Alerting And Threat Detection
One of the main benefits of SIEM when it comes to cybersecurity is its security alerting and threat detection capabilities.
To begin with, SIEM will often connect an IT security team and the enterprise to several threat-intelligence feeds. This helps to keep enterprises up-to-date when it comes to the most current information relating to cyber-attack evolution and the most important threats that businesses face. With this information, enterprises are offered an opportunity to secure their business more accurately against the most common digital threats.
At the same time, once a SIEM solution has normalized and aggregated all the necessary data, it can then analyze for any potential threats made possible through a “security event” correlation. Peculiar activity that occurs in the network in one part might not be indicating a breach, yet several peculiar activities surely might. To take this further, most of the SIEM solutions come with threat monitoring, which allows an enterprise to detect a cyber-attack in real-time.
When a solution is detecting correlated security events, it will send this information to the IT security team to alert them to conduct a prompt investigation. This will allow the team to dedicate their efforts to specific potential problem areas or to discern whether the enterprise has experienced a breach. From here, an incident-response plan can be run to remediate these threats as fast as possible, to reduce any further damages.
Data Storage
Once the data is compiled, it needs to be stored somewhere securely. One of the other benefits of SIEM solutions is that they can assist in storing normalized data, organizing it, and offering an easy way to retrieve it when necessary.
This also assists with compliance, since some of this information might be needed to fulfil a certain mandate. At the same time, SIEM can assist with configuring data storage and this helps to prevent a data breach since many accidents start with data-storage nodes that are misconfigured, which allows hackers access without much resistance.
