Your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution forms the foundation of your detection and response workflow. A full-featured SIEM helps security analysts detect potential threats, investigate suspicious events, and coordinate incident response effectively.

Legacy SIEM solutions enable security teams to gather log data from across the organization and correlate events according to pre-configured detection rules. However, legacy systems rarely meet the real-world security needs of the modern enterprise. To do that, you need a SIEM that successfully leverages next-generation technology.

Modern enterprises need true next-generation SIEM capabilities 

Many technology vendors claim their product is “next-generation”, but that means different things in different contexts. The SIEM industry is complex, with established security brands and open-source SIEM solutions competing for your attention.

All of these solutions come with different features, price points, and ideal use cases. The ideal SIEM for one organization may not work for another. Implementing a SIEM without modern enterprise features can lead to false positives, inefficient response operations, and compliance issues.

Understanding the features that define next-generation SIEM performance is vital to prioritizing those features effectively. When implemented correctly, your SIEM should enable fast, efficient incident response without compromising visibility or control over your security posture.

10 essential features modern SIEM platforms share 

When considering SIEM implementation for your organization, take time to identify how the following features can help you detect and respond to sophisticated threats without compromising operational efficiency.

1. Centralized security data integration and management

If you build blind spots into your SIEM, attackers will exploit them. Your SIEM must have access to every data source in your IT environment, including cloud services, on-premises logs, and network traffic and flow data.

Getting log collectors configured and running correctly can be complex. Modern SIEM vendors go to great lengths to make their collectors easy to manage and reconfigure remotely. This can dramatically improve your security team’s agility and responsiveness.

2. Efficient big data architecture

Legacy SIEM solutions typically run on proprietary architecture. Big data analytics solutions like Elasticsearch, Hadoop, and Mongo had yet to become what they are today.

Now, security leaders and stakeholders demand the ability to scale, pivot, and visualize data using complex data science algorithms. You’d expect every SIEM on the market to be built on a competitive internal architecture that enables these operations, but that’s not always the case.

3. Predictable log ingestion pricing

Log ingestion pricing is hugely important for maintaining scalable security operations in growing organizations. Choosing the wrong pricing structure for your SIEM implementation can lead to significant sticker shock down the line.

The ability to manage security logs effectively is vital to ensuring predictable pricing. If your SIEM licensing fees are based on data consumption rates, you may end up overpaying for log data you do not need. Integrating a data flow and observability tool like Cribl can dramatically reduce these costs.

4. Contextual enrichment of user and asset data

Your SIEM should help analysts conduct investigations by enriching user and asset data with valuable context. Since it is connected to every data-generating asset in your IT environment, it should be able to provide in-depth information about user and asset activities automatically.

For example, you should not have to manually associate IP addresses with user credentials, devices, and timelines. This kind of activity can — and should — be performed automatically by the system so that analysts can focus on what they do best.

5. User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)

User Entity and Behavioral Analytics (UEBA) is a powerful tool for uncovering sophisticated threats like malicious insiders. It works by assessing routine user and asset activities and reporting on anomalies that deviate from the norm.

This allows security teams to go beyond strict rules-based detection workflows. It unlocks the ability to detect and respond to insider threats effectively, without relying on pre-configured rule sets for every possible activity.

6. Automated support for tracking lateral movement

Many of the sophisticated attacks enterprises face today involve lateral movement. Attackers may evade detection and gain access to higher privileges by changing credentials and moving to high-value assets in the network. These incidents are very difficult to track using legacy SIEM technology.

To detect lateral movement effectively, your SIEM must be able to correlate related events from different log sources together. That requires analyzing different parts of individual logs and matching them to indicators of compromise using the latest threat intelligence data.

7. Timeline-based investigation models

Security incidents are rarely discrete events. Treating them this way oversimplifies complex incidents in ways that can impact security event outcomes. The object of an analyst’s investigation should not be a single event, but a timeline of events.

Modern enterprise SIEM platforms use timelines to structure event investigations. Organizing information this way helps analysts understand context and make better security decisions.

8. Customizable prebuilt incident timelines

Previous generations of SIEM technology required analysts to input a complex series of queries and copy the results to a common file to build a timeline. This time-consuming, error-prone methodology can’t keep up with modern security threats.

Your SIEM should automatically build incident timelines according to pre-configured templates. As analysts customize those templates to meet strict security needs, they gain faster and more accurate insights into the organization’s real-time security posture.

9. Automated incident prioritization

An enterprise SIEM platform may analyze hundreds of millions of logs in a single day. Manually combing through this data hoping to find critical-severity incidents is simply not feasible. You need powerful automation and robust analytics to reliably trigger alerts when urgent situations develop.

Today’s best-of-breed SIEM platforms can consolidate hundreds of millions of log entries to tens of thousands of session timelines and pinpoint dozens of notable events contained in them. This results in a much more manageable number of high-risk tickets, helping analysts focus on the most important alerts first.

10. Cross-platform response automation

Incident response operations typically include highly repetitive actions that make excellent candidates for automation. However, these tasks are often spread across multiple different security tools, making it difficult for analysts to create and manage incident response playbooks effectively.

Your SIEM is already connected to every security tool in your tech stack. It should also provide you with the ability to orchestrate those tools according to well-defined incident response scenarios. Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) helps your security team make use of limited time and resources more effectively.

Don’t compromise on your SIEM capabilities 

Lumifi can help you implement a modern enterprise-ready SIEM solution that meets your security needs without overburdening your budget. Our Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solutions are powered by ShieldVision™, a proprietary SOC automation service. Talk to a SIEM expert now about protecting your organization from sophisticated threats.