December 12, 2022
What is SIEM and how does it work?
Security information and event management (SIEM) technology improves visibility across the whole business network, including all devices, applications, users and sensors. SIEM incorporates both cloud-based and on-site environments. Through a centralised interface, SIEM analyses all security information and events in real-time.
It allows companies to swiftly investigate data breaches or other cyber security incidents. Through a continuous monitoring of all log data events and security alerts, businesses can comply with local and international laws and regulations, boost their cyber defences, and have better control over their business networks.
What is new about SIEM?
Next-gen SIEM offers an all-in-one solution to capturing and processing data from everything that is happening on the network. It uses automated tools for collecting information for real-time monitoring, processing, analysis, reporting, as well as long-term storage. This enhanced integrated security solution draws data from the entire information technology (IT) system.
Using customisable algorithms, SIEM provides actionable insights. This can be used to improve business performance, tweak processes, mitigate a cyber attack, or facilitate a forensic investigation in the aftermath of an attack. Through automated triggers and alerts, SIEM supports security teams in rapid threat detection, identification and response.
How does SIEM technology work?
Security teams can streamline their workloads through the improved network visibility and threat detection capabilities offered by SIEM. Drawing data from across the IT system, SIEM collates all security information and events. Through an open and scalable architecture, it supports both on-premises systems, cloud-based applications and servers, and mobile technologies.
Customisable visualisation tools ensure that security teams can analyse and report on incidences accurately and effectively. Automated tools improve operational efficiency and response time. SIEM detects any deviation from normal patterns of behaviour from users, apps or devices. This technology can collect and manage large, complex data sets. It supports big data indexing as well as structured searches.
How does SIEM work in practice?
SIEM works by collecting event and log data throughout the company's digital infrastructure. It brings that data together onto centralised management platform to analyse and sort the information into categories (for example, successful and failed logins, suspicious activity, or other malware or cyber security breaches). SIEM fundamentally allows businesses to gain a full understanding of what's happening within their systems, being able to monitor, report, and mitigate incidents as they occur across the entire network.
Using customisable rules, businesses can set alerts according to their priority level. For instance, if a user account indicates 20 failed login attempts in 30 minutes, SIEM can flag this as suspicious activity but at low priority. It is likely that these attempts were made by the user who had misplaced their login information. In contrast, a user account that generates 200 failed login attempts in a couple of minutes will be flagged as high priority because it's more likely to be a sort of brute force DDoS attack in progress.
Benefits of SIEM for business
With a streamlined view of all existing and new data, business leaders gain a new level of insight into security activities throughout their IT ecosystem. SIEM offers full visibility into the entire attack surface, including distributed environments hosted on on-site, in hybrid or cloud environments.
A single dashboard unifies all applications and network activity. Tech teams can view activity in real-time, gaining excellent insight into the entire IT ecosystem. With on-demand reporting and analytics, organisations get immediate in-depth reporting for visibility, compliance, strategy, and training. IT leaders benefit from a deep understanding of what’s happening on the network through intelligible and actionable analytics.
Businesses can increase their organisational resilience and operational capabilities with SIEM. For more information or to get a quote for our cyber security solutions, email us at marketing@seacom.com or leave us a message.
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