Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms continuously track and correlate log data in your IT environment. This gives them a role of central importance in risk management, compliance reporting, and incident response.

Without SIEM, detecting and investigating threat activity is a difficult process. Your first warning of unauthorized activity will come from a single tool or device in your security tech stack. Once analysts find it, they will have to manually comb through other systems on your network looking for similar activity.

Even in a small business environment, this process is too slow and error-prone to produce consistent results. For a large enterprise, it is practically impossible. That’s why high-quality SIEM performance is on the top of many security leaders’ wish lists.

But to successfully achieve SIEM implementation, you must first make your case to senior leadership. Understanding how SIEM benefits the business as a whole is vital to ensuring buy-in from the board.

Start with what you know 

Since SIEM plays a central role in security operations and risk management, it can have a wide impact on different parts of your IT processes and environment. This is part of what makes the technology such a valuable addition to your tech stack, but it also makes it a challenge to champion effectively.

The better you know your current security tech stack and incident response operations, the easier it will be to describe convincing SIEM use cases. Look for scenarios that involve heightened risk or user experience friction.

In an IT environment without a SIEM, those pain points might be:

• Fragmented security event monitoring and security operations across multiple different tools.
• No consistent solution for 24/7 round-the-clock monitoring.
• Inability to detect sophisticated threats, like malicious insiders.
• Inefficient compliance and reporting processes.
• Lack of visibility into security performance and risk management.

In an environment with a legacy SIEM, those pain points might be:

• Lack of scalability to cover growing security needs in a cost-effective way.
• Slow deployment and configuration processes that can’t keep up with modern cloud infrastructure.
• No access to advanced security technologies like User Entity and Behavior Analytics (UEBA).
• High total costs of ownership due to ongoing investments in hardware, software, and specialist talent.

The better you understand these pain points, the easier it will be to translate them into a business continuity and risk management context. Try to contextualize these issues in ways that are likely to resonate with senior leaders and stakeholders.

Understand the capabilities of modern SIEM solutions 

Whether your organization is implementing its first SIEM or upgrading a legacy solution, it’s vital you know exactly what defines a modern SIEM. The SIEM industry has come a very long way since its inception in the mid-2000s.

Early SIEM solutions combined Security Event Management (SEM) with Security Information Management (SIM) in a relatively simple way. This was revolutionary at the time, but still relied on rule-based triggers and known threat signatures.

Behavioral analytics and automation 

Over time, vendors increased the capabilities of their SIEM platforms. Predictive AI and behavioral analytics allowed analysts to detect and investigate threats that other solutions could not.

For example, a hacker using stolen credentials to infiltrate a sensitive system would go unnoticed by an early SIEM. The same activity would reliably generate alerts in a UEBA-enhanced SIEM environment, enabling incident responders to neutralize the threat before it causes irreparable damage.

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) is another valuable integration that has quickly gained industry-standard status. SOAR uses APIs to integrate the SIEM with third-party security tools, enabling cross-platform automation and incident response.

This allows the security team to create and deploy incident response playbooks that combine multiple tools and actions into a single process. When the system observes activity that meets pre-defined conditions, it can automatically launch response actions and stop the threat in near real-time.

Compliance and reporting 

Almost every organization has regulations it must follow. Even if your organization is not in a regulated industry, voluntary participation in incident response frameworks like NIST or SANS sends an important message to customers and stakeholders alike.

Your SIEM platform is not the only solution you can use to achieve cybersecurity compliance, but it is one of the best tools for the job. Since SIEM platforms centralize security information and event data across the entire organization, they can be a valuable asset for ensuring compliance.

Instead of manually retrieving data from every host in your IT system and building individual reports, you can automatically generate reports directly from your SIEM. To do this, you will need a SIEM that normalizes data across every host in your system and supports custom compliance reporting.

Visibility and customization 

Enhanced visibility is one of the greatest advantages to deploying a modern SIEM solution. Your SIEM is designed to connect with every data-generating device on your network, providing context into security events and activities occurring in real-time.

That visibility is crucial for successful security operations and risk management. Threat actors look for hidden spaces in complex enterprise networks and use them to achieve persistence. Once they find an area of safety where they can evade detection, they can move laterally across the network in pursuit of their goals.

Gaining visibility into your IT environment is the first step towards enhancing your security posture with custom detection rules and automated incident response playbooks. When leveraged altogether, these processes and workflows dramatically reduce the time and effort needed to secure large, complex systems.

That means that instead of constantly onboarding hard-to-find talent to your security team, you can scale your team’s capabilities to meet the organization’s needs. Implementing a modern SIEM is the first step towards achieving operational security excellence.

Make Lumifi your SIEM advisor and expert 

Lumifi is a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) vendor that specializes in SIEM implementation, operation, and management. We will help you optimize your SIEM to meet your organization’s security needs and provide on-demand expertise from our state-of-the-art SOC 2 Type II-certified Security Operations Center (SOC). Talk to an expert to find out how we can help you implement a modern SIEM platform today.