What is SIEM?
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a software-based product that collects and scrutinizes all activity data from an IT network. By analyzing this data, concerning trends and potential threats can be uncovered and dealt with, ideally before they cause problems. SIEM makes the data it gathers accessible through sorting, categorizing and organizing it for security professionals who can then use it for prevention and research. The most visible features of SIEM are threat detection, investigation and faster threat response time, yet there are many more, including:
- Normalization
- Forensics
- Advanced threat detection
- Log collection
- Threat response workflow
How is SIEM used?
While enterprises mainly deploy SIEM within their security ecosystem, it does have alternate applications. Some companies use SIEM to achieve compliance with large regulatory agreements, including GDPR, HIPAA, etc. Others use two separate SIEM deployments to handle security and compliance.
SIEM’s ability to aggregate large amounts of data is also a way to track and allocate project resources. Bandwidth, budget and understanding trends can all be handled by SIEM, which means companies can accurately manage growth and minimize spending when it comes to prevention.
The future of SIEM
We’ve discussed how SIEM is used now, but what about in the future? How will it change as technology evolves?
- Improved collaboration with managed service provider (MSP) solutions will be necessary to ward off the sophisticated threats of tomorrow. Complimenting an in-house SIEM security ecosystem with a more effective MSP managed detection and response (MDR) tool will become more common.
- Better management and monitoring of cloud resources will be a must for MSPs that provide SIEM to their cloud customers.
- Sophisticated orchestration will be needed. Today, SIEM’s workflow automation is limited. In the future, SIEM orchestration will need to be faster in order to deliver real-time protection, company-wide.
For more information on how security services can benefit your customers, contact the experts at Ingram Micro.