As enterprise IT and security teams increasingly adopt cloud-based tools and solutions, SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) is rapidly evolving. SIEM integrates security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) into a single security management system.
SIEM solutions have various functions within security organizations, such as acting as a system of record for compliance, audit, forensics data, and reporting or monitoring security alerts and data, providing a single source of truth on real-time, prioritized alerts across an organization.
According to Gartner, by 2023, 90% of SIEM solutions will exclusively provide capabilities in the cloud, such as log storage, analytics, and incident management, up from 20% in 2020. As a result, enterprise IT and tech buying teams should prioritize these technical and functional requirements when assessing any new SIEM tools and solutions.
7 SIEM capabilities CIOs must assess
When evaluating new SIEM solutions, enterprise tech buying teams should identify and prioritize essential criteria to ensure that the solutions meet the defined use and business cases. These requirements should be applied consistently to assess the relative value of different options and shortlist the best candidates.
- Analytics
When searching for SIEM tools, CIOs must ensure that they leverage real-time analytics to detect and prioritize events or activities that could indicate a threat, compliance issue, or something else of interest to users. The solution should provide batch analytics for identifying and correlating weak signals in data that were not detected in real-time.
- Feature administration
The SIEM solution should include tools to manage, maintain, and support complex functions such as log and data source management, analytics and detection content, reporting, user roles, access control, technical integration, and response workflows.
- Natively available content management
The function of natively available content management is to offer data collectors, parsers, analytics rules and models, compliance packages, use cases, and response workflows, actions, and plays. This content can be accessed and updated by administrators through an included management framework.
- Product usability
CIOs must prioritize SIEM solutions that offer intuitive, user-friendly interfaces to encourage user engagement, particularly for users outside of traditional IT teams. It is also important to define use cases for the SIEM that align with the organization’s security monitoring objectives. These use cases should be used as design requirements to focus on performance and resource utilization for priority issues.
- Data storage
It is crucial to ensure that the new SIEM tool provides adequate data storage capacity and supports required file types, locations, and processes like extraction or eradication. With the exponential growth of the global threat landscape, it is recommended to use cloud-based solutions for their scalable storage capacity.
- Integration
Integrating with all relevant applications, data sources, and technologies is critical for any new SIEM tool. SIEM threat detection performance depends not only on SIEM and its configuration but also on the entire detection stack and all supporting telemetry chosen to be sent to it.
- Monitoring, logging, and tracking
Make sure that the SIEM solution can deliver proactive notifications for system events across all your environments, including physical and virtual appliances, cloud services, and software, as well as any combinations of these. It should also generate logs and resolution reports for all identified issues.
The latest SIEM solutions utilize different analysis techniques, including correlation, statistical deviation, and machine learning to detect threats and other events. They enable the enterprise to transform raw alert data into actionable intelligence using the analysis method based on the monitoring objective.
Here we discussed seven critical requirements, which may be highly desirable but not strictly essential for a use case. Therefore, CIOs must rank their team’s requirements as being of high, medium, or low importance and determine which solutions work best technically and practically to meet their needs.
Source: Gartner
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