Overview
Organizations and businesses in many industries are increasingly reliant on technology to provide mission-critical functions. However, serious IT breaches continue to plague organizations and make headlines across the media as cybercriminals look to exploit any loopholes they find in IT systems, including applications and hardware.
There is a plethora of ways to combat IT breaches, and one of the most important is the ability to identify and promptly respond to security events in real-time to minimize their impact.
This article defines SIEM solutions and provides you with five best practices for the successful implementation of what is an important defense mechanism and compliance control tool for information security teams.
SIEM Defined
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a type of software that gathers log data and real-time event data generated from systems throughout an organization’s technology infrastructure and turns it into actionable information.
Among the systems that a SIEM solution collates data from are antivirus software, firewalls, host systems, database servers, web filters, network switches, and more. The SIEM tool takes all this information and aggregates it for a broad end-to-end view. The software then analyzes the aggregate data to find patterns and correlations and provide reports on security-related incidents and events.
Important uses of SIEM tools include alerting security staff about immediate security issues that need to be dealt with, and automated monitoring for compliance with important regulations such as HIPAA, PCI/DSS, and GDPR.
For a more detailed overview of SIEM, including information on its origin and evolution, check out this What Is SIEM? resource by Exabeam.
Best Practices to Implement SIEM
1. Establish Requirements First
Start by getting a well-defined picture of the requirements for your SIEM deployment, including objectives, prioritized targets from those objectives, and the overall workflow.
It’s a good idea to begin with a clear view of the use cases for SIEM for your particular business. Question exactly what it is that this solution will do for your organization and take things from there. Review the security processes and policies that can support your proposed SIEM implementation, including existing controls in place to meet compliance requirements.
2. Begin with a Pilot Run
Don’t attempt to implement a SIEM system throughout the entire organization’s IT infrastructure at the same time. A pilot run is a good way to test the waters by running the technology on a smaller subset of your technology infrastructure. Not only does this phase provide proof of concept; it also demonstrates the potential return on investment for a SIEM system.
To get any kind of meaningful proof of concept from this pilot run, it’s important that this subset of devices and policies you initially run the SIEM system on is representative of the wider context. The data you obtain from a pilot run is crucial in identifying weaknesses in security policies or compliance controls that should be plugged.
3. Collect As Much Data as Possible
More information is better when it comes to feeding data into a SIEM system because the essential role of these tools is to take a bunch of log and event data and answer meaningful questions from it. But those questions can’t be answered without sufficient data.
Start with the obvious data sources, such as logs from network devices and servers. Don’t neglect other important data sources, including identity and access information, vulnerability scanner results, and system configuration data.
Of course, there will be limitations within some organizations with regards to the feasibility of collecting information from every single component in the IT infrastructure and feeding it into the SIEM. In cases where there are limitations, prioritize protected environments and devices handling regulated data.
4. Have a Comprehensive Incident Response Plan
A huge part of the appeal of SIEM is that it provides real-time monitoring and alerts for IT threat detection, facilitating rapid responses to a range of security incidents. However, the onus for properly responding to these incidents falls on the organization that implements SIEM — not on the tool itself.
A comprehensive incident response plan answers a number of important questions, such as:
- Who needs to do what during a data breach or other information security event?
- How do you prioritize and document security events?
- In what format will a breach be reported to your incident response team (e.g. email, text, etc)?
- Who is responsible for communicating with customers, law enforcement, and business stakeholders following an information security compromise?
- Are the appropriate backups and disaster recovery solutions in place?
SIEM can intelligently identify cybersecurity threats you never even knew existed or had visibility into, however, a comprehensive incident response plan provides exact guidelines for IT security teams on what to do to remove a threat and/or minimize the negative impact of such events.
5. Continuously Refine Your SIEM Deployment
SIEM doesn’t cater for a “set and forget” approach. Extensive planning and implementing slowly step-by-step are some best practices, but it’s also important to have a culture in place that emphasizes continuous refinement and improvement.
After all, cybercriminals tend to come up with increasingly sophisticated forms of attack, and remaining a step ahead means continuously improving the security tools, policies, and procedures at your disposal.
Running a production SIEM deployment itself gives you a wealth of useful feedback for you to tweak and fine-tune everything to better protect against security threats.
Wrap Up
SIEM is one of the most useful solutions at your disposal to combat the threat of cyber security incidents and ensure your organization complies with industry-specific regulations governing how data is used and stored. Follow the five best practices outlined above to ensure a smooth implementation of your chosen SIEM solution.
