Categories
Blog

Owning a SIEM vs. Managed SIEM Services: What’s Best for You?

Home » Blog » Owning a SIEM vs. Managed SIEM Services: What’s Best for You?

Owning a SIEM vs. Managed SIEM Services: What’s Best for You?

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) software is a cybersecurity solution that collects information about different events across the IT infrastructure and aggregates it. All the events produce telemetry. For instance, if a user opens a computer and connects to a website, the firewall will create telemetry that includes user name, IP address, login time, etc.

SIEM aggregates all the telemetry from different events and does logging, reporting, and event correlation. It will collect data from everywhere and give a single timeline to enable a security analyst to view everything from a single pane of glass. The analysts can then use this information to identify Indicators of Compromise (IoC) to detect and prevent any breaches. But why have a SIEM, you may ask?

The Need for Having a SIEM

The telemetry produced is vital information about your IT assets. However, without a SIEM in place, you cannot make use of this information. A SIEM must bring all the information to a single place and correlate events to detect suspicious patterns.

Another primary reason for having a SIEM solution is to stay compliant with international standards. To help organizations remain secure and resilient to threats, various governments and organizations have created different compliances, such as PCI, SOC2 Type2, NIST, GDPR, ISO27001, etc. Every business needs to stay compliant with these rules or face both cyberattacks and legal consequences. These compliances require firms to store and save log data for at least one year. This is because the adversary might have started the system breach process long before it got breached. Having historical log data can help detect when the breach was initiated and what pattern was followed.

Moreover, having the SIEM solution and the log data also enhances root cause analysis. Without a SIEM in place, analysts can’t know what pattern was followed by the attackers and cannot prevent future attacks. These reasons make it essential to have a SIEM solution in place.

What to Look Into the SIEM Solution?

As already established, SIEM is no more an option; it has become a necessity. However, to ensure that your SIEM solution can address all the needs mentioned above, it needs to have a certain set of essential features that include:

Collects Data From All Sources

A SIEM solution is only as effective as the amount of data it can collect. Hence, the solution you use must gather data from all IT assets, whether on the cloud or on-premise. This means it should be easily integrable and centralized. When your SIEM solution collects data from all sources, it enables your security team to analyze it for quick detection and response easily.

Machine-Accelerated Anomalous Behavior Detection

As the threat landscape evolves, it is becoming challenging for human resources to cope with innovative attacks. According to a recent report, 98% of the participating organizations agreed that automation is required to deal with large alert volumes. Hence, a modern-day SIEM must-have AI/ML capabilities to complement your static correlation rules for better detection.

Behavior Analysis

Your SIEM should be able to perform statistical analysis to detect unusual behavior. Additionally, based on the previous incidents, it should also assign risk scores to such behavior and alert your team when necessary.

Automated Lateral Movement Tracking

Once an attacker is inside your network, he or she will try to access and attack as many systems as possible through lateral movement. Your SIEM should be able to correlate all such log incidents and track lateral movement.

Incident Prioritization Capabilities

An organization can easily produce around 10GB of log data every day. However, your team cannot look into all the incidents. Hence, the SIEM solution should eliminate false positives and prioritize only abnormal behaviors that lead to breaches.

What are the Different Buying Options for SIEM?

SIEM comes as software, and you need to deploy it on a heavy-duty server so that it has the required resources to store and analyze millions of data logs daily. You can get this software through two different methods:

Own the License

You can buy the software and license to run it. In this scenario, you will need to have an infrastructure, either on-premise or on the cloud, with heavy-duty servers to deploy the SIEM solution. Besides the infrastructure, you will also need a team to monitor SIEM, the right skills to create rules, and expertise to deal with the incidents.

Managed SIEM Service

The second option you have is Managed SIEM Services. Managed SIEM means you contact a third-party vendor to handle and manage everything. When you opt for Managed SIEM Services, you don’t need to buy the software, license, infrastructure (unless you opt to host it on-premise), resources to monitor and manage SIEM, etc. Thus, all you need to do is pay a monthly or annual term fee, and the vendor will take care of everything.

Why go for Managed SIEM Service?

Deploying a SIEM solution does not end the task. It requires 24/7 attention, and you cannot simply deploy and forget it. The first thing you need to do is create rules. SIEM will aggregate and show all the information in one place. But you need to create correlation rules to detect malicious behavior. However, since the threat landscape is changing quickly, you need someone well-versed in the cybersecurity industry. The person should be skilled with SIEM and threat research to create efficient rules. Secondly, you need to monitor your SIEM solution to ensure it is healthy, does not have any resource challenges, is highly available and maintained.

Moreover, you need someone to monitor the SIEM 24/7. The solution will give you alerts, but you need to monitor them and take necessary actions. Thus, you need to have the infrastructure and a team with the expertise to deploy and set up SIEM, create rules, and monitor it 24/7, or else you are not using SIEM effectively. This entire process makes it very challenging to deploy and leverage a SIEM solution until you have the time and resources to spend on it. Managed SIEM Services eliminates all the challenges that you may ever face. Since the vendor will be managing anything and everything, you can focus on core business areas.

Benefits of Using Managed SIEM Services

Compared to having your own SIEM software and license, leveraging Managed SIEM Services provide numerous additional benefits. Some of these benefits include:

Reduced Deployment Costs: With Managed SIEM Services, you don’t need to buy the software, license, infrastructure, or resources to deploy and manage the solution. This can save you a fortune that otherwise you might have to pay as the upfront cost for deploying SIEM.

Streamlined Security: Vendors provide core SIEM services, such as 24/7 monitoring, incident response, correlation, etc. This streamlines and increases the efficiency of daily security operations.

Rapid Deployment: Managed SIEM vendors have the right infrastructure to handle the massive amount of daily data, thereby increasing the deployment speed.

Access to Expertise: Managed SIEM Service providers have their own team of experts who can help you create rules, analyze logs, monitor alerts, investigate incidents, detect and prevent threats, etc.

Access to Technology: With Managed SIEM Services, you get access to the best cybersecurity technology and tools your vendors use. Licensing these tools separately can lead to additional costs.

Why Prefer SharkStriker’s Managed SIEM Service?

SharkStriker’s SIEM solution is not just another SIEM but a next-gen, fully managed SIEM that you can deploy on-premise or on the cloud. We can provide you with the infrastructure and quickly deploy our SIEM solution to help you become compliant with international security standards. In addition to the core services, such as compliance, rules creation, log aggregation, etc., the key features and services that come as part and parcel of our Managed SIEM Service includes:

  • ML and AI-accelerated
  • Mapped with baseline security and CIS benchmark
  • File integrity management
  • Vulnerability assessment
  • Periodic testing
  • Weekly reports
  • Periodic alerts
  • Hands-on remediation support for all incidents
  • 24/7 SOC

Our fully Managed SIEM solution can free you from all the hassle of event and log management. Click here to connect and leverage a next-gen SIEM solution backed by a 24/7 tech-powered SOC. You can also write to us at [email protected], and our experts will soon get in touch with you.

Takeaways

  • Although SIEM is a billion-dollar industry, not all organizations using it can get value from it due to a lack of skills, expertise, and resources. Managed SIEM Services can eliminate these challenges and enable businesses to leverage SIEM solutions optimally.
  • Ensure that your Managed SIEM Service provider gives SOC2 Type2, GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO 270001 compliance services.
  • Modern-day SIEM needs to have ML/AI capabilities for quick analysis, detection, and incident response.

Hosting on-premise or on the cloud depends on your requirements. For instance, some financial institutions don’t want their data to leave the premises. Hence, they opt for on-premise deployment. If you trust your vendor and want the best benefits of SIEM solution, you can go for cloud hosting.

MDR

Complete Visibility, Continuous Monitoring
& Advanced Threat Protection with
AI-backed Incident Remediation.

Read More >

Latest Post

All
Blog