Whether it’s a data breach, malware attack, or targeted ransomware campaign, more and more organisations are falling victim to security incidents in 2024.
Half of businesses and around a third of charities report having experienced some form of cyber security breach or attack in 2023, according to the UK Government's 2024 Cyber Breaches Survey. This is much higher for medium businesses (70%), large businesses (74%) and high-income charities with £500,000 or more in annual income (66%).
As cyber attacks spike for SMEs and large enterprises alike, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools are crucial to protecting your business from downtime and crash when incidents strike.
What is a SIEM Tool?
A SIEM tool is a software solution that helps organizations manage, monitor and maintain their overall security posture. It helps organisations collect, aggregate, and analyze security data from a variety of sources — including network devices, security appliances, and applications — and use this data to identify potential security threats.
SIEM software can instantly alert your security team in the event of an attack. It collects logs and event data from a wide range of sources across your network, including devices, applications, servers, users, and firewalls, and makes it easy for security to search and analyze all of this data in one place.

SIEM systems also correlate events from different sources to identify patterns and trends that may indicate a security threat. For example, an SIEM tool might correlate a failed login attempt from one source with a successful login attempt from another source to identify a potential brute-force attack.
With this, it can generate alerts when it detects suspicious activity, allowing security teams to quickly investigate and respond to potential threats.
Key Features of SIEM Tools
1. Log collection and aggregation
SIEM tools collect logs and event data from a wide range of sources across your network, including devices, applications, servers, users, firewalls, and even cloud environments.
SIEM tools also parse this raw log data, extracting relevant information and enriching it with context by adding timestamps, user IDs, or threat intelligence details. This process helps to standardize the format of the data from various devices and applications, making it easier to analyze.
SIEM tools store the collected data in a central repository. This allows for long-term storage, which is crucial for forensic investigations, historical analysis, and compliance purposes. Retention periods will vary depending on the organization's needs and regulations.
2. Event correlation and security analytics
SIEMs use pre-defined rules and statistical correlations to analyze the data in real-time. They search for patterns and relationships between events that might indicate a potential security threat. SIEMs can leverage various analytical techniques like real-time analysis, batch analysis, and even user and entity-based analytics (UEBA) to identify suspicious activity.
3. Alerting and reporting
If the SIEM analysis identifies something suspicious within the data source, it triggers an alert for the security team. These alerts typically include details about the event, its severity, and potential impact and SIEM tools can generate reports that summarize security events and trends over time.
These reporting capabilities can be helpful for identifying trends, tracking down attackers, and demonstrating compliance.
4. Compliance reporting
SIEM security solutions can also be used to generate reports that help organizations comply with security regulations, providing a central repository for security data to make it easier for organizations to meet the reporting requirements of various compliance standards.
Many SIEM solutions offer pre-built reports that map security events to specific compliance controls mandated by regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA, or GDPR. This simplifies the process of demonstrating that your organization is meeting its compliance obligations.
5. Integration with SOAR and Threat Intelligence Feeds
Some SIEM capabilities include integration with SOAR platforms to automate incident response tasks. This can help to save security teams time and effort, and it can also help to ensure that incidents are responded to consistently and effectively.
SIEM tools can also integrate with threat intelligence feeds to provide security teams with information about the latest threats and vulnerabilities. This information can be used to improve the accuracy of SIEM alerts and to help security teams prioritize their investigations.
Best SIEM Tools

While there is no perfect, all-size-fits-all solution to incident response, choosing the best SIEM tool for your business can mean the difference between swift recovery and months of disruption.
We're counting down ten of the best SIEM tools in 2025, each of which can help your business detect, investigate, and mitigate security incidents effectively.
Comments ( 0 )