Ad Image

The Top 9 Enterprise SIEM Challenges Facing You Today

The Essential 16 Incident Response Books for Professionals

The Top 9 Enterprise SIEM Challenges Facing You Today

What are the nine most pressing enterprise SIEM challenges facing you today? What can a SIEM solution actually offer your enterprise? Which capabilities should you prioritize? 

SIEM solutions may seem confusing and intimidating from the outside. However, SIEM solutions can solve plenty of cybersecurity challenges facing modern enterprises. The network perimeter proves increasingly porous (if it even exists at all). Only by solving SIEM challenges can your enterprise benefit from the necessary threat detection for next-generation cybersecurity. 


Widget not in any sidebars

So what are the top nine enterprise SIEM challenges facing your business today?     

Top Nine Enterprise SIEM Challenges Facing You 

1. Lack of Threat Intelligence

Of course, these SIEM challenges could occur even with a threat intelligence feed. In this case, the problem comes from a lack of relevant threat intelligence. After all, not all threat intelligence is created equally. Your enterprise needs information that corresponds to your business’ industry; its size, industry, infrastructure, and more. For example, ransomware specifically targeting manufacturing IoT may not affect your retail business. 

To combat these SIEM challenges, you need a cybersecurity solution that provides multiple threat intelligence feeds corresponding to your business. Moreover, your threat intelligence feeds must also scale with your IT infrastructure and adapt to an evolving threat landscape.   

2. SIEM Deployment

One of the most persistent SIEM challenges, deployment confounds IT security teams of all sizes. Often, IT security teams try to deploy their SIEM solutions throughout the entire network all at once. Of course, this strategy consequently makes other SIEM challenges such as alert fatigue and log collection overstimulation much more pressing. 

To deploy SIEM effectively in 2019, your enterprise needs to start small. Instead of making choices recklessly, you must make your SIEM decisions decisively. To avoid these SIEM challenges, you need to start your deployment with the most sensitive areas and databases. By doing so, your IT security team can observe how the solution operates; thus, they can also make adjustments as they expand their security event monitoring. 

3. Alert Fatigue

One of the most persistent SIEM challenges involves your team becoming buried under security alerts. In traditional SIEM solutions, security event correlation generates alerts as it uncovers potential events. However, these security alerts often mistake legitimate behaviors and activities as correlated attacks. False positives, as these alerts are called, drain IT security teams’ investigation times; as such, false positives drain time, and resources, and willpower. They contribute to burnout and to legitimate threats dwelling for longer.  

On the other hand, a next-generation SIEM provides your IT security team with target alerts with contextualization. These contextualization capabilities sort through behaviors and unique temporary privileges to ensure the alerts meet correlation rule standards. They can answer the question of whether each alert merits closer investigation—reducing investigation time. 

4. Getting Caught Off Guard

SIEM challenges don’t just include efforts to prevent cybersecurity. It also involves your enterprise responding to a data breach or cyber attack. A SIEM solution can seriously contribute to investigation and remediation efforts, but your enterprise must also participate.  That is why incident response proves so vital in case of a cyber attack.; relying on the solution alone can leave a security vulnerability which only your employees can solve.  

An incident response plan helps facilitate your communications and remediation efforts during a breach. It can help employees recognize threats and know who to contact when a threat occurs. Once your security team becomes alerted, they can conduct threat mitigation and alert relevant departments like legal. With practice and clear instructions, your incident response plan can keep you on guard against incoming cyber threats. 

5. Unsecured Data Storage

Your enterprises can easily lose track of your sensitive data and databases; this may seem surprising, but it comes as a side effect of scaling environments and more users engaging with the data over time. 

Part of this stems from honest mistakes. For example, users often store corporate data in unsecured sites as part of their business processes. Frequently, companies discover S3 web buckets or plaintext storage hosting personally-identifying information—often after they suffer from a data breach. But you also can’t rule out insider threats deliberately placing sensitive data in an area for easy extraction.      

Thankfully, SIEM works to provide visibility over this sensitive data and databases and can prevent employees from transferring data outside approved storage areas. 

6. Undiscovered Devices 

SIEM challenges often focus on discovering unpatched devices, but a more sinister threat also exists: devices not even registered by your cybersecurity. In particular,  IoT devices and mobile devices often end up unmonitored without SIEM’s visibility capabilities. Instead, they become blind spots in your network—ideal targets for hackers’ dwelling threats. Also, unmonitored devices serve as stepping stones to the real targets in your IT environment. 

SIEM helps discover devices and maintain monitoring over them 24/7. After all, you can’t protect what you can’t see. 

7. Abnormal Behaviors 

An underappreciated entry in the list of SIEM challenges are your actual users and third parties. How can you tell if one of them has turned into an insider threat? Conversely, how can you tell if a hacker compromised on of your users’ accounts? Without establishing a behavioral baseline for each user, you can’t. That’s where user and entity behavior analysis (UEBA) steps in.   

With SIEM’s UEBA capabilities you can establish behavioral baselines for each user, device, application, and third party as they conduct their business workflows. If they deviate from these behaviors, as during compromised credentials compromise or insider threats, your IT team receives an alert. 

8. Correlation Rule Challenges

Many SIEM challenges begin with correlation rule challenges. SIEM relies on correlation and log collection rules for optimal performance. Your correlation rules determine what your solution considers security events and alert thresholds. Poor correlation rules cause alert fatigue through more false positives and fewer discovered breaches. Meanwhile, strong correlation rules can help streamline your alerts and facilitate prompt investigations and remediation. 

In addition, your log collection rules determine how and from where you draw security data, so you can draw only from security event data from only key network areas. Next-generation SIEM helps facilitate correlation rule generation through machine learning. With this capability, your solution can learn from the correlation rules you input and expand upon them through experience.  

9. Log Management 

Finally, we can’t finish a list of SIEM challenges without mentioning log management. Log management refers to the collection and storage of log files from operating systems. It can also collect information from applications and multiple hosts and draw them into a single centralized location. 

No one can overstate the importance of centralization in both cybersecurity and SIEM in particular. The decentralized nature of modern networks makes it difficult to properly compare the log information and to examine them simultaneously. Centralizing them through SIEM allows your IT security team to correlate potential security events and discover security incidents more easily.

If you want to learn more about SIEM solutions, be sure to check out our Buyer’s Guide.

Download Link to SIEM Vendor Map

       

Share This

Related Posts