Implementing SIEM solutions strengthens the Cybersecurity posture at organisations

Appeared in Indiatimes.com | 29 March 2022
By Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, Chairman and Managing Director

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Data as the new currency in today’s digital economy needs to be safeguarded from cyber-criminals to ensure day-to-day smooth business operations.  However, the IT infrastructure in organisations, across all edges, whether data centre, networks, cloud or remote working environment, is vulnerable to data breaches, stalling business continuity. Furthermore, with acceleration in digital transformation and hybrid working cultures across businesses, threat to cybersecurity has only increased further.  Networks of Work from home (WFH) or remotely working individuals could be unprotected and vulnerable to phishing and other attacks, with business sensitive information getting into wrong hands to be manipulated, thereafter. In addition to this, is the increasing complexity of hybrid environments, creating further challenges to security teams while they struggle to address cyber threats at scale, as the business demands.

SIEM solution- need of the hour

With the number of cyberattacks increasing across the world, it becomes all the more important to safeguard huge volumes of data that feed new product development and innovation besides enhancing customer service. To protect business critical data across on-premises data centres, networks, cloud environments, applications, firewalls and other security devices, security teams have to rely on key tools.  Security information and event management (SIEM) solution plays a key role in helping security analysts by monitoring, identifying, analysing incidents and events and delivering real-time alerts and reports.  The tool will also take automated action to respond to threats, before they occur.

At the outset, SIEM tool collects data, events and logs from all the sources and formats before analysis.  Then the data is stored and categorised in the right manner as part of the data management process, reducing the false positives and enhancing the performance of the SIEM solution.  With filtering process of the SIEM tool, only critical data can be retained which is also useful to meet the compliance requirements of maintaining such data between 1 to 7 years.  Security teams can also integrate the SIEM solution with the other cybersecurity software to identify, analyse and responds to threats in real time.

In organisations where the Security Operations Centre has the challenge of staff shortage, then SIEM solution can play the supporting role in eliminating costly security breaches, impacting businesses.  Furthermore, this solution is scalable too, thereby bringing high value to security operations.

Choosing the right SIEM solution for organization’s unique needs

With alarming statistics of data breaches, it is really crucial to invest in the most appropriate SIEM solution to ensure data protection and business continuity, in addition to mitigate threats and stop major data leaks before they occur. Selecting the right SIEM security solution most suitable for the business can be achieved by considering few relevant factors.

An ideal SIEM tool has the capabilities of collecting different logs, from various sources, and normalising them before analysis.  The tool should be flexible to scale up or down as and when required and perform threat detection based on correlation, and generate alerts accordingly.  Timely detection of events and prevention of attacks should be achieved by the tool too.  Dashboards should display real-time insights regarding security, from across the network.  If the risk score for a threat is high, this aspect should be displayed on the dashboard in real-time, calling for immediate action.

The right SIEM tool must have a flexible architecture to process data in all formats and identify attacks with threat intelligence feeds and relevant contextual information.  It should also be flexible to perform as per the need of the organisation, irrespective of whether it operates on cloud, on-premise or in a hybrid environment.

SIEM solution should also ensure seamless management of security incidents across the network.

Cybersecurity has no doubt become a top priority today for enterprises of all sizes, where SIEM tool plays a key role in ensuring efficiency in managing security events.

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