Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) technology forms the foundation of effective detection and response operations. As enterprise IT architecture gets more complex and cybercriminals become bolder and more confident, the need for SIEM-enabled visibility and control continues to increase every year. 

As a result, SIEM platforms are adapting to meet modern cybersecurity challenges. The new generation of SIEM solutions provide real-time threat monitoring and detection with in-depth contextualization and automation-ready workflows. Many of them offer AI and ML capabilities alongside centralized dashboards for data visualization and reporting. All of these features address obstacles legacy SIEM platforms face in complex enterprise environments. 

However, not every solution on the market today is a full-featured SIEM 2.0 platform. Some are stuck in the past. Others offer a limited set of modern capabilities but drag down security performance in other ways. Many appear to be designed solely to meet compliance requirements and offer no further value beyond that. 

Enterprise security leaders looking to harness the power of the SOC (Security Operations Center) Visibility Triad need to augment their SIEM capabilities with true next-generation technology. Only a few platforms have what it takes to offer truly modern SIEM performance. 

Features to Demand in Your SIEM Implementation 

The following ten features are what make next-generation SIEMs stand out from the rest. Security leaders that want best-of-breed security information and event management should filter out solutions that do not offer these crucial modern features. 

Comprehensive and efficient log management 

Modern threats rarely limit themselves to a single data source. To detect threats, your SIEM platform must gather comprehensive data from every source in the organization. Anything less than total coverage is an invitation for threat actors to hide in plain sight. 

Integrating successfully with a broad range of applications and IT assets across the entire enterprise is no small task. Your SIEM must collect logs from cloud-hosted infrastructure, on-premises hardware, network assets, identity providers, databases, applications, and more. 

This adds to the complexity of log management. You need a centralized solution for conducting security log management tasks like processing compliance artifacts, completing sub-team reports, verifying log efficacy and usage, and more. That requires modern, scalable Big Data architecture. 

Modern, scalable big data architecture 

Legacy SIEMs typically retain the proprietary approach to database architecture that was common decades ago, when those systems were still new. Much has changed since then, and new big data frameworks like Hadoop, Mongo, ElasticSearch, and BigQuery offer dramatically improved scalability compared to what previous generations of SIEM platforms relied on. 

Implementing a SIEM with scalable big data architecture can make a dramatic difference. Enterprises generate and process more data than ever. The ability to harness advanced data science algorithms when handling large security log datasets is a serious competitive advantage. Faster queries and streamlined data visualization significantly enhance security operations performance. 

Cost-effective log retention and management settings 

Log retention and management is vital to SIEM performance, especially with modern cloud-hosted SIEM software. The expanding footprint of enterprise software applications and data has led to an explosion in the size and volume of log data SIEM platforms must analyze. 

Keeping all these logs in the platform itself can quickly become prohibitively expensive. Without any formal method for purging unneeded logs or addressing excessive accumulation, the total cost of ownership for a modern SIEM can grow exponentially over time. Eventually, security teams feel pressure to delete old logs to make space for new ones—threatening the organization's security posture as a result. 

Not all solutions require you to keep log data in the SIEM, however. Third-party solutions like Cribl can simplify log retention and management by providing deep observability and control over data flows. This lets security analysts get the data they need, when they need it, and avoid overpaying for expensive cloud storage in the process.  

Lumifi supports partner technologies with Cribl alongside its own proprietary SOC automation platform, ShieldVision. The ability to read data from any source is a powerful advantage when addressing log management concerns with your SIEM. 

Contextual data enrichment 

Individual logs do not generally provide much information on potential threats. Effectively investigating suspicious activity requires launching comprehensive investigations into the context surrounding security events. Data enrichment provides security professionals with advanced analytics capabilities right alongside the log data they are looking at. 

Contextualization usually means performing a correlation. Modern SIEM technology contextualizes security events with security-related data from other observed events. Some examples of data enrichment include: 

• Correlating observed behavior with indicators of compromise associated with known threat actors. 

• Correlating IP addresses with user credentials, devices, or security event timelines. 

• Correlating network user and device types with certain activities. 

• Correlating personal identity data (like email addresses or contact information) with employee user accounts. 

• Corroborating events/alerts from one platform with outcomes or activities logged in another 

In a SIEM 1.0 environment, security analysts must conduct these activities manually. Modern machine learning capabilities allow organizations to automate this part of security event management, grouping events together based on their shared characteristics. 

User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) 

The static rules-based approach of SIEM 1.0 technology does not provide protection against insider threats or unknown threats. Next-gen SIEMs do provide comprehensive visibility into insider risk, by leveraging UEBA technology. 

UEBA assesses every user, asset, and application on the network, and creates an evolvingmodel that represents expected behaviors. It then observes the network and/or log events and searches for examples of anomalous behavior, deviations from the routine, and other unusual activities. UEBA then assigns a dynamic risk score to each user and asset, showing what level of risk they represent within various use cases and MITRE framework 

By measuring the likelihood of malicious behavior in authenticated accounts, UEBA enables zero trust adoption while enhancing visibility into some of the world's most sophisticated and challenging cyberattacks. The ability to observe and analyze abnormal behavior is a game-changing enhancement to any SIEM platform, and a must-have for enterprise use cases. 

Lateral movement tracking enhanced with automation 

Lateral movement heightens the danger associated with cyberattacks, potentially leading to more advanced and persistent threats. Threat actors may take over the accounts of privileged users or disable security tools in ways that hurt the organization's incident response capabilities. 

Despite the risk involved, traditional SIEM products are not particularly good at detecting lateral movement attacks. That is because they require analysts to manually piece together attack timelines, picking out relevant data from static event-centric reports. 

This legacy SIEM event-based monitoring is not well-suited for detecting timeline-based events like lateral movement. UEBA timelines can follow individual accounts and assets as they move through the network.

Timeline-based visibility into security incidents 

The discrete events-based view that SIEM 1.0 solutions rely on comes with many drawbacks. Being unable to track lateral movement is just one of them. This type of interface also makes it difficult to distinguish between false positives and malicious activity, while dragging down the platform's reporting capabilities. 

Advanced threat detection is only possible when analysts can quickly and accurately map abnormal activity to potential security threats and observed behaviors over time. The timeline is the ideal form factor for this kind of analysis. It tells you exactly what actions any given user or asset has taken, while providing context and actionable insights from real-time monitoring. 

Modern SIEM solutions should communicate information this way by default. This simple change can lead to dramatic improvement in Security Operations Center (SOC) performance, enhancing their ability to detect and contain security breaches early on. 

Customizable incident timeline interface 

In a legacy SIEM environment, building a timeline requires making a long series of complex queries and then pasting each source to a repository—usually a regular text editor. This is a time-consuming process that demands a great deal of technical expertise. As the amount of contextualized data available grows, the process only becomes longer and more complicated. 

This is exactly the kind of repetitive, time-consuming task that is ripe for automation. Your SIEM should allow you to preconfigure a timeline-based interface that gives you all the relevant data through a single pane of glass. 

Customizability is important because every organization has unique security needs. You may want curated threat intelligence feeds added to certain user, asset, or event timelines. You might want a list of associated network devices, similar potential security incidents, or a wide range of other security issues brought to analysts' attention right alongside the event under investigation. 

Context-aware prioritization of security incidents 

The typical enterprise environment may generate hundreds of millions to billions of security logs every day. This is an incredibly high volume of data even for an efficient, well-optimized SOC (Security Operations Center). All this data must be normalized, parsed, analyzed, and filtered before drawing analysts' attention. 

Your SIEM must also choose which events should be analyzed first. That means conducting analysis of security events and prioritizing the results according to a well-defined policy. If this process is not properly configured, your analysts may waste time investigating low-risk events while critical-severity issues remain unresolved. 

Next-generation SIEM solutions leverage artificial intelligence to enrich security event data and conduct more accurate log analysis. This provides the context the system needs to assign higher priority to higher-risk events. 

In-depth SOAR integration capabilities 

The value of your SIEM does not end at detection. The platform should also contribute meaningfully to your organization's response capabilities. Integrating your SIEM with a Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solution augments your incident response capabilities with additional insights and robust analytics. 

SOAR technology enables your security team to develop response playbooks that address unique cyber threats and then launch those playbooks automatically. You can engage multiple security solutions in the incident response workflow without requiring security personnel to move between multiple tools and platforms. SOAR gives you one place to control all your security technology. 

It also allows you to deploy preconfigured connectors between IT and security infrastructure. Easily transfer data from access management systems, email servers, network access controllers, and more without having to build custom scripts for each connection. 

Are you ready to take your SIEM to the next level? 

Lumifi combines next-generation SIEM technology with its own SOC automation platform, ShieldVision™. This gives analysts the ability to see all vendor security platforms in one location, including your SIEM. ShieldVision comes with thousands of detection rules and methodologies available out of the box, enabling cross-platform automation, proactive threat hunting, and more.  

Leverage world-class product expertise to optimize your SIEM implementation, develop custom rulesets, and deploy 24x7 security monitoring. Find out how we can help you make the most of your SIEM deployment and enable faster, more accurate detection and response to your security operations workflows.