A Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) collects relevant data about the enterprise’s security generated from multiple sources and is able to analyse all the data to produce intelligent and actionable output.

Capabilities of SIEM solution
Deploying an SIEM solution provides you with the following benefits:

  • Data Aggregation:
    Data is collected from multiple data sources which include network devices, servers, databases, applications etc.
  • Correlation:
    It links events together into meaningful bundles by using correlation rules.
  • Alerting:
    This is an automated analysis of correlated events and production of alerts to notify recipients of immediate issues that require attention. These alerts can be fed to a dashboard, or sent email or SMS.
  • Dashboards:
    They take in the collected event data and transform the information in the form of informational charts and graphs. This greatly assists the SIEM team to visually identify patterns or distinguish activity that doesn’t conform to normal operations of the network.
  • Compliance:
    Applications can be employed to automate the gathering of compliance data, producing reports that adapt to existing security, governance and auditing processes.
  • Retention:
    Employing long-term storage of historical data to facilitate correlation of data over time and provide the retention necessary for compliance requirements. This also serves as a crucial piece of evidence during forensic investigations.
To ensure that only pertinent information is passed to the centralized server, processing can be applied on the collection agents. That way the volume of information being communicated and stored can be reduced. Through these SIEM systems are quite expensive to deploy, the cost factor associated in deploying them is one-time only.

Further, compliance mandates and industry standards like PCI-DSS have led to the widespread adoption of SIEM across the organization. It also acts as a useful detective control to identify a presence of an Advanced Persistent attack (APT) in corporate network.

How we can help you?
Our Solutions team has worked on numerous SIEM products and solutions offered by our partners such as HP ArcSight, RSA Security Anlaytics, Splunk, etc. and have deployed across various devices. We can help analyse your existing setup and ensure you’re getting maximum return on your investment. Be it fine-tuning source devices, configuring correlation rules, ensuring proper alerts, dashboards and reports have been created, we provide an entire suite of expert consulting services to ensure your SOC – Security Operations Centre is working at maximum! We provide extensive training services for you security team to get well versed with the installed SIEM solution. We also handle any troubleshooting issues arising out of deployment or during the usage of SIEM.

Incident Response and Forensics training form a critical requirement for SIEM technicians and analysts. They need to be regularly updated with latest security trends and be aware of the threat vectors - especially which come directly under the umbrella of business operations. It is a good practice to ask for regular training exercises for your SOC team from the vendor itself; including it as a part of the contract agreement only. This will help to effectively utilize the deployed SIEM solution.

For operating SIEM operations, it is necessary to cultivate the culture of cross-domain expertise among your SIEM teams to enhance their skill set. The team must be proactive in its approach regarding security and not just act in a traditional defensive way. Team members must learn to quickly recognize the patterns emerging from the normal expected behaviour and be able to identify possible attack vectors when the existing setup is susceptible. In these cases, escalation matrix must be strictly adhered to when incident tickets are raised.

For this to take place effectively, SIEM teams must take precedence over operational teams of SOC; facilitating swift action during emergencies. The team needs to work dedicatedly in isolation so that no conflict of interests arises in its operations. SIEM teams typically report directly to CISO or to the manager who heads information security operations.

Our Partners in SIEM Solutions

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