The SIEM process forms a part of a critical branch of cybersecurity. By the collection, naturalization, and correlation of log data generated by an organization, SIEM tools can help you to lower security breaches using proactive security.

Data Visibility And Aggregation

Visibility into your IT environment is perhaps among the largest advantages of SIEM. Visibility works with the way in which logs are correlated and normalized in a SIEM tool.

Regardless of the business size, there are usually several different components that are present in the IT environment, and each of these generates, formats, and sends significant volumes of data. These components not only produce a lot of data, but they are also doing this in entirely different ways. Trying to comprehend all this data manually would be a close to impossible task. It would also require devoting a massive amount of energy and time to a task that could be automated.

This is why the capabilities of SIEM that are associated with data normalization and aggregation are so important. The SIEM tool not only stores and collects data from security tools within an IT environment from a location that is centralized, but it also normalizes the data into a format that is uniform allowing you to compare this data with ease. These tools can also correlate and analyze the data, finding the connections that can assist with detecting any security threats quickly.

Incident Detection

Most of the hosts on a system that are used to log any security breaches often do not include any built-in incident-detection abilities. This means that they are able to observe events or produce log entries, yet they cannot analyze these for potential malicious activities. However, since SIEM tools analyze and correlate log data that is produced across the hosts, they can also pick up any incidents that may have been missed, either when the logs that were relevant weren’t analyzed properly or when they were separated too widely between the hosts so they went undetected.

As cyberattacks continue to become a lot more sophisticated, they have found ways to avoid detection in much better ways. By normalizing and gathering log data that is coming from different systems, SIEM tools are able to pick up different elements relating to an attack that can be viewed on different hosts in the system. For instance, one portion of the attack may be visible on the operating system of the computer, while another portion may be viewed on the network-intrusion prevention system.

In the way of correlating the log data generated by each host, these tools can reconstruct the events in order to confine the accurate nature relating to the attack as well as pick up if the attack was successful. Once correlated events are detected, the SIEM tool will be able to send an alert that notifies the IT team providing a comprehensive scope of this attack and directing the team to the log data that is associated so they can react accordingly.

There is a big difference between the detection of attacks as they happen in real-time versus the detection of the attack that has already occurred and succeeded. In the way of picking up incidents that may have gone undetected until a much later stage, the SIEM workflow is able to limit the damage scale that could have resulted from these threats.

Improved Efficiency

The SIEM tools are capable of dramatically improving efficiency in regard to handling and understanding events in an IT environment. With SIEM tools, it is possible to view security-log data that comes from several hosts in the system from one interface. This speeds up the process of handling incidents in many ways.

To begin with, the opportunity to see the log data easily from all the hosts in the environment will allow an IT team to rapidly identify the route of an attack through the business. Secondly, centralized data allows you to identify hosts that may have been affected by the attack in a much easier way.

SIEM tools come with automated tools that utilize data analysis and correlation to stop an attack as it is detected. These abilities allow these SIEM tools to prevent attacks as they are in progress or to contain the hosts that are already compromised, which lowers the impacts of a full security breach.

Working with more efficiency in relation to security incidents that are ongoing, is a valuable asset for MSPs to offer to their customers. With the ability to respond rapidly to any perceived events, SIEM tools help to decrease the financial implications of breaches and the damage amount that occurred, to begin with.

Easier Compliance Reporting

Just about every company, regardless of the industry or size, has some form of regulations they have to comply to. Ensuring that a business abides by these regulations and that it can prove that they are compliant is often a time-consuming and difficult task. Fortunately, the collection, the normalization, and the organization relating to log data, and SIEM tools have made the process of compliance reporting a lot simpler. The advantages of SIEM tools when it comes to a centralized logging solution, especially when it comes to compliance reporting happen to be so important that certain companies deploy SIEMs mainly to streamline and simplify compliance reporting tasks.

The majority of compliance reporting will demand thorough customized reports that include any relevant logged-security events that come from all the hosts present in the IT environment. Without a SIEM system, it is very unlikely that the organization has any reliable centralized logging capabilities. This means that they might be required to retrieve data manually from each host in the IT environment, or they may have to generate a report from each of the hosts followed by reassembling these into one report. This is especially complex since each host in the system logs data differently, making correlation a huge effort when there are no SIEM tools present that can automatically normalize the log data.

SIEM tools have the potential to save companies both money and time by making compliance reporting much simpler and ensuring that MSP customers haven’t violated any of the regulations. Without precise reporting that is used to prove compliance, a business could be faced with a hefty fine or even lose accreditation. With SIEM tools, MSPs are able to generate reports easily which will provide details on the compliance of their customers with any regulatory protocols that are relevant.

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