What is Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)?

Security information and event management (SIEM) is a software-based cyber security solution that aggregates and analyses activity across the entire IT infrastructure, covering sources such as network devices, servers, domain controllers, and SaaS solutions. It determines a baseline of normal behaviour by establishing trends across the security data so that it can identify and flag anomalous behaviour that may indicate a cyber threat. These deviations may be categorised as a "failed login", "account change" or "potential malware" depending on the guidelines security admins set for the alert threshold and subsequent response. As the SIEM can identify patterns, it is able to detect a correlation across multiple events that may otherwise go undetected, and raise an alert. This security data is logged in a database, enabling deep forensic investigation and supporting auditing and regulatory compliance requirements.

Features of a typical SIEM solution

Log Data Management: Log data is collected, analysed and correlated in real-time across a wide range of sources across an entire distributed IT environment. This enables security teams to automatically manage their network's event log and network flow data from a single unified location. 

Network Visibility: The inspection of packet captures provides visibility into network flows with additional insights into assets, IP addresses, and protocols to expose malicious activity such as malware files or the exfiltration of sensitive data. 

Threat Intelligence: Some SIEM solutions incorporate threat intelligence feeds to recognise and mitigate new vulnerabilities and attack signatures. This is crucial in preventing your organisation from being crippled by zero-day attacks. 

How can your organisation benefit from a SIEM solution?

Implementing a SIEM solution is a proactive way of automating and streamlining security workflows which brings many benefits to organisations. These include: 

Advanced real-time threat recognition: By providing comprehensive, real-time visibility across your entire distributed environment, the SIEM solution can expose potential threats and vulnerabilities before they are able to disrupt business operations. This helps to strengthen an organisation's security posture as they continue to scale by significantly reducing the lead time required for threat detection and response. 

Regulatory compliance auditing: A SIEM functions as a highly efficient data orchestration system which streamlines the collection and analysis of systems logs and security events. This centralised auditing enables organisations to meet regulatory compliance standards while significantly reducing the resource expenditures that would otherwise be required to manually perform real-time audits and on-demand compliance reporting. 

Detecting Advanced and Unknown Threats: With integrated threat intelligence feeds and AI technology, SIEM solutions are able to protect organisations against modern-day security breaches such as insider threats, phishing attacks, SQL injections, DDoS attacks and data exfiltration. 

Monitoring Users and Applications: As more organisations adopt the hybrid and remote working models, organisations require a greater level of visibility to ensure their networks are protected against threats outside the traditional network perimeter. By tracking all network activity across all users, devices and applications, SIEM solutions significantly improve transparency across the entire infrastructure while detecting threats regardless of where they originate from. 

How COOLSPIRiT can help

We strive to help our customers save valuable time, money and resources which is why we have partnered with industry-leading SIEM solution providers to offer a range of products suitable for organisations of all sizes.

Contact our expert team today to learn more at 01246 454 222 or hello@coolspirit.co.uk.