Four Reasons for Replacing the SIEM

By Nils Krumrey, Cybersecurity Expert, Logpoint

In the globalized, digital economy, it is essential that enterprises monitor and guard their data to protect themselves from increasingly advanced cyber threats. Chances are your company has more data to collect and analyze than ever before. In fact, according to IDC’s Data Age 2025 study, the global datasphere will grow to 163 zettabytes (a trillion gigabytes) by 2025, which is ten times the 16.1 zettabytes of data generated in 2016.

Security incident and event management (SIEM) has been around since 2005, but as the threat landscape evolves to one that involves new levels of sophistication and heightened numbers of attacks, the criteria for an effective solution, too, has evolved. Companies must be able to monitor activities that can lead to potential threats in real-time, meaning they require solutions that can pinpoint a larger variety of threats even faster and more accurately than ever before.

At the same time the amount of federated collaboration in organizations has dramatically increased, degrading the well-defined security perimeter and exposing a larger threat surface than ever before. Consequently, network infrastructure is growing in complexity and size, and at the same time the number of business “pains” that can arise from a breach is increasing. This is a key development in making a modern SIEM a crucial element in enterprise cybersecurity.

In addition, the shortage of security analysts caused by the “cybersecurity skills gap” with the knowledge and skills makes it difficult to keep pace with the evolution of cyber threats and increasingly stringent compliance demands. Security operations teams are struggling to keep up with the deluge of security alerts and must rely on manually created and maintained document-based procedures for operations. To counter these obstacles, many organizations over the years have implemented SIEM solutions.

For years, SIEM solutions have been implemented to help security and IT teams analyze security alerts in real- time, though many legacy SIEM solutions lacked the ability to gather and analyze large amounts of data from a variety of sources. In addition, SIEM solutions of the past could not scale with an organization as it its needs grew.

Organizations spend considerable time and effort to establish and maintain SIEM. Businesses must train their teams, while operationalizing and optimizing workflows around the SIEM – efforts that can take years to establish. But the truth is, many times, it still does not feel right; there are a number of reasons why this unease persists among SIEM customers.

If your business can recognize one or more of the following signs, it is probably time to change:

1. Your SIEM is cumbersome to deploy and manage

It took months to deploy your SIEM. After a slow and difficult deployment, many organizations are still embattled with a large amount of their efforts directed towards ingesting new types of data feeds or simply setting up analytics. Changes to the configuration require extensive time and security resources to complete.

2. Your SIEM is inflexible

Your SIEM solution is limited to security data types, ultimately limiting your team’s analytic capabilities within detection, investigation and response.

3. Your SIEM is antiquated

Your SIEM’s main feature is log collection and provides little value without experienced analysts. It lacks the ability to leverage multiple sources of threat intelligence and provide advanced analytics and automation through machine learning, automation and orchestration.

4. Capital and operational costs are unpredictable

The complicated pricing scheme of your current SIEM makes it impossible to get the transparency and the detection and response capabilities you require. In reality, what you have purchased turns out to be a platform, not a security solution. You require experienced staff, and lots of it, just to keep your current system operational.

Organizations today must be attentive about investing in the right cyber expertise to thwart potential threats. While there have been investments in education and skills training, the cybersecurity skills gap is getting wider. To counter this skills gap, organizations must invest in the right technological capabilities to counter the alert-fatigue and overload of security tools. This is where modern SIEM solutions come into play by having great integrations and even native machine learning and automation tools to complete many of the tasks that companies cannot hire people to take on.

Today’s modern SIEM solutions enable companies to react quickly and precisely in the event of a threat or data leak. A modern SIEM solution provides collection, classification, detection, correlation and analysis capabilities in one place, making it easier for teams to monitor and troubleshoot IT infrastructure in real-time. Without a SIEM solution, security analysts must go through millions of non-comparable and siloed data for each software application and security source.

Fortunately, the new era of digitalization and machine learning is creating new possibilities for SIEM solutions to make a big impact on businesses across industries. To establish an effective cybersecurity program, a modern SIEM solution is a must-have for businesses large and small.