What is Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)?

Security information and event management, or SIEM, is a security solution that helps organisations recognise and address potential security threats and vulnerabilities before they have a chance to disrupt business operations.

SIEM systems help enterprise security teams spot user behaviour anomalies and use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate various manual processes associated with threat detection and incident response.

The original SIEM platforms were log management tools. They combined security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) tools, enabling real-time monitoring and analysis of security-related events.

Over the years, SIEM software has evolved to integrate behaviour analytics and other advanced security analytics, as well as AI and machine learning capabilities, to identify unusual behaviours and indicators of advanced threats. SIEM has become an important part of modern security operation centres for security monitoring and compliance management use cases.

SIEM executes various features to identify threats.

All SIEM solutions perform some level of data aggregation, consolidation and sorting functions to identify threats and follow data compliance requirements. However, some solutions vary in capability, and most offer the same core functions.

1. Log Management: SIEM absorbs event data from multiple sources across an organisation’s IT infrastructure, including on-premises and cloud environments. Event log data from users, endpoints, applications, data sources, cloud workloads, networks, and security hardware and software, such as firewalls or antivirus software, is collected, correlated, and analysed in real-time.
2. Event Correlation and Analytics: Event correlation is essential to any SIEM solution. Using advanced analytics to identify and understand complex data patterns, event correlation provides insights to locate and mitigate potential business security threats quickly.
3. Incident Monitoring and Security Alerts: SIEM consolidates its analysis into a single, central dashboard where security teams monitor activity, triage alerts, identify threats and initiate response or remediation.
4. Compliance Management and Reporting: SIEM solutions are popular choices for organisations subject to various forms of regulatory compliance. Due to its automated data collection and analysis, SIEM is a valuable tool for gathering and verifying compliance data across the entire business infrastructure.

SIEM’s Benefits

Regardless of how large or small an organisation might be, taking proactive steps to monitor and mitigate IT security risks is essential. SIEM solutions benefit enterprises in various ways and have become a vital component in streamlining security workflows.

1. SIEM solutions enable centralised compliance auditing and reporting across a business infrastructure.
2. Using deep machine learning that automatically learns from network behaviour, these solutions can handle complex threat identification and incident response protocols in less time than physical teams.
3. SIEM can be an essential driver of interdepartmental efficiencies because it improves visibility into the IT environment.
4. Considering how quickly the cybersecurity landscape changes, organisations need to be able to rely on solutions that can detect and respond to both known and unknown security threats.
5. SIEM solutions are ideal for conducting computer forensic investigations once a security incident occurs. SIEM solutions allow organisations to quickly gather and study log data from all of their digital assets in one place. This will enable them to re-create past incidents or analyse new ones to investigate suspicious activity and implement more effective security processes.
6. Compliance auditing and reporting are necessary and challenging tasks for many organisations. SIEM solutions decrease the resource expenses required to manage this process by providing real-time audits and on-demand regulatory compliance reporting whenever necessary.
7. SIEM solutions track all network activity across all users, devices and applications, significantly improving transparency across the entire infrastructure and detecting threats regardless of where digital assets and services are accessed.

The evolution of security information and event management has benefited all organisations worldwide. These features are necessary for every entity as they provide various solutions that cater to security teams’ needs.

How can iZOOlogic help my Company or Organisation?

Find out how iZOOlogic can provide similar benefits offered by security information and event management through our Digital Risk and Compliance services.

To find out more about how iZOOlogic can help protect your company’s cyber security, schedule a demo.