SIEM solutions help organizations meet compliance mandates, including HIPAA, SOX, PCI, NIST, GLBA, and GDPR. They also provide tools for incident response and threat detection. Advanced SIEMs go beyond correlation rules, leveraging user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and deep learning to identify anomalies in data. This can help security teams detect insider threats and targeted attacks.
Table of Contents
Real-time Monitoring
In today’s digital world, time is money. When something goes down, it costs the organization time and resources, so it’s vital to have an effective real-time monitoring system in place. SIEM solution providers provide real-time visibility into indicators of compromise, security misconfiguration, and cyber threats to help organizations make better risk management decisions. They analyze data and logs, detect patterns of malicious activity, and generate alerts that prompt users to take action. Real-time data aggregation gives organizations an overview of their network activities in a single location. This enables them to see the scope of potential security breaches and ensures they can respond quickly. Often, next-gen SIEMs come with built-in connectors that allow data from multiple sources to be collected and analyzed in a single system.
Moreover, many SIEM systems have built-in compliance reporting features to help companies comply with their regulations. These features include data archiving, secure storage, and automated reporting. Another important feature is data normalization, which helps identify and track security event correlations. This data is then used to identify trends and determine how to protect your business from future threats. In addition, SIEM solutions can also be used to collect and manage log data across all your devices, including cloud resources and services.
Historical Analysis
Historical analysis is the ability to examine an event, period, or time from several different perspectives. It can be done through direct comparison to other events, theory building, or by reference to the present. Comparative historical research is often based on natural or evolutionary models and explores how human societies have changed through time. This type of analysis also usually involves cross-cultural studies. This kind of research can be a valuable tool for compliance management. It can help identify possible threats to a system, analyze potential vulnerabilities and provide insight into how attackers operate. However, this approach has some drawbacks, including that historians must consider their values when interpreting the evidence and making conclusions about the past. This is known as historical bias and can lead to inaccurate interpretations or overly broad conclusions about a topic or period. Another issue is that historical data may be incomplete or lack context for security professionals to interpret correctly. This is particularly true when log data is collected from multiple sources, such as user devices, servers, network equipment, and security controls. SIEM solutions allow security teams to see the complete picture of security activity, enabling them to identify and prioritize threats. They can then systematically respond to them, reducing the chance of security breaches. They can also generate compliance reports to demonstrate that the organization is taking all necessary steps to secure its assets and comply with industry regulations.
Reporting
The role of SIEM solution providers in compliance management is to provide organizations with an automated, audit-ready way to monitor and report on log data across the IT infrastructure. This helps companies meet regulatory standards such as HIPAA, PCI/DSS, SOX, and FERPA. These solutions can detect suspicious activity that risks a company’s security or business continuity using historical and contextual event data. For example, an error message on a server can be correlated with a firewall connection block or a wrong password attempt on an enterprise portal. Another component of a SIEM solution is User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA). This technology uses machine learning and advanced algorithms to determine whether a user, router, or entity deviates from their usual behavior. It then erects a baseline profile of that person’s everyday activities, such as communication, downloading, or application usage. In addition to UEBA, some SIEM solutions can identify lateral movement in a network, an essential technique attackers use to search for valuable information or assets. These systems often support automation and alerts for a lateral move that can be sent to system administrators. The right SIEM solution provider can help your team promptly and efficiently monitor and respond to any security incident that might occur, including compliance issues. They can also help your organization achieve compliance with regulatory requirements such as FFIEC, HIPAA, and SOX.
Alerts
SIEM solution providers often offer alerts in addition to security logs, allowing organizations to monitor their systems and uncover potential breaches. Some solutions even include alert aggregation, enabling security teams to focus on fewer alerts and get more done quickly. Alerts can be sent to specific recipients or automatically emailed to an entire organization. They are a crucial part of compliance management because they allow you to know when something is wrong and take the necessary steps to remedy it. Most SIEM solutions have correlation rules or models that surface alerts when abnormal behavior occurs. For example, if an employee has logged in from a different location and carried out a file transfer, the system can flag this as suspicious activity and raise an alert. Another technology component SIEM uses is User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA). This data mining technique analyzes how a user or entity interacts with your network. It helps detect suspicious behavior like downloads, communication, or applications and identifies abnormal patterns and behaviors. Alerts are generated almost immediately after an event matches your policy conditions. Select a policy from the list to see its match conditions, whether and when you receive notifications and severity level. Once you’ve set up conservative policies, they can be viewed on the Alerts page in the compliance manager.