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How Gauge Your Enterprise’s Security Operations Success

What are Vulnerability Management Solutions? Why Do They Matter for SIEM?

How Gauge Your Enterprise's Security Operations Success

You have it all set up. You’ve done your research. You’ve selected the most fitting SIEM or security analytics solution for your enterprise. You’ve deployed it carefully and with great deliberation, taking it step by step. Above all, you’ve formed a security operations team to work with your solution and monitor for threats. Is it finally time to sit back and relax a little from the constant worry of threat actors and data breaches?

Well, not quite. With all this in place, now the question becomes: how do you gauge security operations success in your enterprise?   

After all, SIEM, security analytics, and cybersecurity overall require continual evaluation and adjustment in order to most optimally protect your assets and databases. Without some measure of self-awareness and self-evaluation, your enterprise won’t have the foundation on which to build a comprehensive and adaptive cybersecurity platform.

Here are a few capabilities and areas to focus on when trying to determine your enterprise’s security operations success. You can also read the “How to Build a Security Operations Center (on a Budget)” whitepaper by SIEM solution provider AlienVault. 

Response Time

First and foremost, one of the most important weapons in your arsenal against hackers is speed.

Dwell time—the time a hacker or malware program is allowed to persist in your network uncontested—is one of the major factors in determining the severity of a data breach. Unfortunately, the average dwell time can last anywhere between 49 days and 150 days if not longer…with each day compounding the damage to the enterprise.    

With the cybersecurity paradigm shifting from prevention to detection-based models, one of the key questions concerning your enterprise’s security operations success is how quickly they can respond to dwelling threats both in the initial detection phase and the remediation phase. With threats hiding in huge volumes of data, collecting, compiling, standardizing, and analyzing that data for evidence of threats as quickly as possible is essential. This is no mean feat but it stands as an essential task.   

False Positive Investigation Time

SIEM, security analytics, endpoint detection and response, and other threat detection capabilities present the likely possibility of false positives—alerts identifying normal digital behaviors as suspicious or misrepresenting events as security risks. In fact, according to some studies, the majority of alerts generated by security detection capabilities are false positives. Yet your security operations team needs to investigate each alert to ensure they don’t mistake a genuine threat for a false positive. This means time, energy, and resources tracking down false leads.    

Security operations success hinges on whether your security team can identify false positives quickly and move onto detecting the real threats rather than wasting time with the latter. So the question becomes how quickly your security team can start and finish investigating a new alert.   As we said above, time is of the essence in cybersecurity. Following every dead end wastes your most valuable resource, so wasting as little time as possible means greater efficiency.

Threat Intelligence Accumulation

Where is your security operations team getting their threat intelligence? Do they rely on your security solution provider or do they have external sources? Do they gather their own threat intelligence? How are they applying their intelligence in a technological and in a human investigative sense?  

The answers to these questions will help you determine your security operations success. Speak your security team and find out if they need more threat intelligence sources or if they may be overwhelmed with intelligence and require organization.  

You can also read the “How to Build a Security Operations Center (on a Budget)” whitepaper by SIEM solution provider AlienVault.


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