SIEM enables centralized reporting which is just one benefit of deploying a solution within your organization. The central location allows for alerting, dashboards, correlation, just to name a few.
Security Information and Event Management (or SIEM) solutions collect events and logs from a numerous hosts and systems to enable storing of events centrally. By having the events in a central location, security analysts can create correlations on data that would be much harder or impossible using separate systems.
Historically, SIEM solutions have been very complicated to implement and just has difficult to manage. Now, there are many solutions that even small and medium sized businesses can utilize in order to further protect their business. With deploying a SIEM comes with many benefits. To name a few:
- Compliance and Reporting
- Detecting Incidents
- More efficient incident response process
Compliance and Reporting
SIEMs make compliance and reporting very streamlined. Organizations without centralized event management will have a difficult time confirming systems are functioning properly and meet compliance needs (such as PCI, ISO2700). It may be necessary to collect events from many endpoints in order to report on them. Without a centralized location, it can be very time consuming collecting information from all systems.
With the use of a SIEM, analyst can create reports and even alerts to aid in ensuring all systems stay with compliance needs. These reports can be automated and even alerted upon when a particular systems becomes out of compliance.
Detecting Incidents
Hackers may be in your networks already. Attacks can go undetected for weeks and even months. Most endpoints to done include an easy way to look through security logs by default. By feeding various events such as: system event logs (Windows Event Logging), Anti-Virus logs and others to a SIEM, detections can be created across all systems easily. Having the ability to search all endpoints via one location is extremely valuable.
Incident Response Process
On top of just detecting incidents and notable events, SIEM can also aid in the incident response process. You can easily create workflow for diving deep into particular events or actions and see what other types of activity may have been performed or what data was accessed. More so, you can take it to the level and automate the response process by creating alerts that respond to the activity. The possibilities are endless.
