Unlocking SIEM’s Full Potential

CENTRALIZING DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS TO FIND PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOR 

SIEM’s full potential can be unlocked when it incorporates data beyond NetSec events. In other words, when it can correlate identities, access rights, user and application activities, audit logs, geo-location, and NetSec events to prevent and control suspect behavior based on the discovered patterns. 

Security information and event management (SIEM) works because of a simple concept: the data that gives the most accurate picture of your enterprise security is produced and contained in systems scattered all over your network. The problem is, the most important data contained in these separate security silos, are not always centrally correlated to provide an accurate threat landscape. Whether driven by compliance needs from standards such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or out of fear of advanced persistent threats (APTs), organizations of all sizes recognize the value of SIEM, and more and more are adopting the technology.

SIEMs: Making things more manageable.

Important data is scattered all over your enterprise, from your desktop clients to your directory servers, to your database systems and network devices. But it might as well not exist if you can’t easily access it or parse through it for common attributes or meaningful, actionable information. SIEMs can make this more manageable. Through log management and centralization, a SIEM can take all of these disparate data sources and bring them together into one place, providing customers real-time monitoring, threat intelligence, and behavior profiling. They can take you from zero awareness of what’s going on in your enterprise to almost overwhelming levels of detail.

Where SIEMs often falls short.

As you can imagine, all of that information can be difficult to keep up with. Your people can get snowed under with alerts, some real, some not, but each needing to be addressed, triaged, and either actioned upon or dismissed. And for each of these events, there should be an audit log created, trouble tickets updated, and metrics captured. How much of that can your staff handle before SOC discipline breaks down due to work volume? There’s also the problem of tuning. Like a new employee, you have to train a SIEM to understand what information is essential. This takes time, attention, and effort to set up; three things no IT organization has in overabundance. Some large scale SIEM deployments can be incredibly complex, and eat your time and your budget as it takes months to fully train the tool to provide a somewhat useful level of detail vs. the overwhelming crush of event data it can be capable of.

It’s overwhelmingly a problem of human processes and delay that are bottlenecking your response.

Expanding SIEM’s reach   

The power of xenexXDR is in how it can extend both your security team and your SIEM. With your SIEM doing its job, capturing and forwarding event data from across your enterprise, xenexXDR turns this data into action, responding to threats, updating your audit trail, and reducing the amount of repetitive, time-consuming work your team has to contend with. While your SIEM can capture and normalize threat data, its ability to provide instantaneous responses through intelligent automation is significantly limited. In most organizations, the job of sorting through this data belongs to security admins and their favorite battery of shell scripts. The challenge here is that as the number of correlation rules increase in volume and complexity, your analyst’s ability to manage the work suffers. In almost every case, it’s not a matter of your organization’s portfolio of network tools or how much money you’ve spent on threat detection and analysis. Instead, it’s overwhelmingly a problem of human processes and delay that are bottlenecking your response. Think about it: today’s enterprise environment has more data than ever before and it’s coming from sources and devices that didn’t exist a decade ago. In our ever expanding Internet of Things, your customers, your employees, and increasingly the secondary and tertiary devices they use are creating an explosion of data that only adds to your overall security burden. It’s the work of deciding what do with the information, acting upon it, and capturing those decisions that bring security operations to their knees, and send incident response times skyrocketing.