By Amos Aesoph, Xigent CISO
Security information and event management (SIEM) solutions allow you to collect log data from multiple sources within your company’s tech infrastructure, identify potential issues and take appropriate action to address security risks.
Why bother with SIEM? Being able to look at all of your company’s security-related data in one place makes it easier to sift through the noise and identify real threats to your data security with real-time alerts. Another major benefit of a SIEM solution is analytics: being able to drill down into individual incidents or general threats by pulling the data back out of your system.
What reports should you be running out of your SIEM? It depends on your team’s point of view. Here are some ideas depending on your role in the organization.
Leadership: Are attacks going up or down? Are they coming from a particular part of the world? Are they focused on one of our business units? Can we show ROI on that last security widget we installed because this data point today is better than the same data point last month/quarter/year?
Management: Where are our problem areas? Workstations, IoT, web servers, etc.? What areas are in need of extra focus/money/effort to stay ahead of the curves we are seeing?
Engineers: What happened overnight? Did the fix we put in place on Wednesday solve our problems by Friday? What’s that unusual change in protocol/port/user quantities? What applications are being used that shouldn’t be on my network?
Your ability to extract answers to these questions is predicated on the quality and quantity of data coming into your SIEM, the right amount of tuning, and watching the data on a cadence. Unfortunately, we have run into many who have thought just by having a SIEM in place, they somehow were better off without giving it the care and feeding it requires.
How do I decide what SIEM solution is best for my organization?
Xigent has the experience to help you find the right solution for your business, even if that means just using what you have now. There are hundreds of new threats every month and as many new products to fight them. Data security is critical to every business no matter the size, industry, or importance − but for effective data security, you need a plan and the resources and capabilities to execute that plan.
To learn more about our cybersecurity services, visit https://xigentsolutions.com/managed-services/cyber-security-services/
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