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What Drives Business SIEM Adoption in 2020? 5 Factors

Expert 2021 Cybersecurity Predictions (Insight Jam Roundup)

What Drives Business SIEM Adoption in 2020? 5 Factors

What drives business SIEM adoption? Why should your enterprise select, deploy, and maintain a SIEM solution on your IT infrastructure? How can it benefit your organization and its workflows? 

SIEM appears incredibly complicated to observers from outside the cybersecurity discourse. However, it actually follows a straightforward process like any other InfoSec solution. 

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First, it aggregates and normalizes security event information from all over the network. This includes information from firewalls, authentication portals, databases, applications, and more. Second, through data normalization and analysis, SIEM can look for correlations between security events and thus detect probable security incidents. Third, it can send an alert to your IT security team, prompting them to investigate and quickly remediate the attack. 

Additionally, next-generation SIEM solutions can contextualize the threat alert, helping the team distinguish false positives from legitimate attacks. Some solutions can freeze potentially malicious processes until the IT team investigates, or otherwise automate threat hunting. 

Unfortunately, SIEM adoption often ends up delayed or suspended due to an undeserved reputation for complexity and cost. Some enterprises don’t move forward because they don’t want the maintenance demands of SIEM solutions which helps effective correlation analysis. Others feel that only the largest enterprises need a cybersecurity solution of this level of sophistication. 

Yet enterprises of all sizes can benefit from SIEM adoption. Here’s why.     

What Drives Business SIEM Adoption in 2020? 5 Factors

1. Compliance with Industry-Specific Regulations

Every enterprise in every industry vertical must follow certain compliance requirements on penalty of heavy fines. Often, these mandates include regulations involving data privacy, cybersecurity, or network configurations. 

Filling out all of the necessary reports can prove a serious challenge, especially to overextended IT security teams. Thankfully, SIEM solutions often come with out-of-the-box report capabilities with automatic fulfillment. This takes a serious burden off the shoulders of your IT security team. Additionally, SIEM often helps fulfill the cybersecurity requirements just through adoption.     

2. Cloud Security, Visibility, and Misconfigurations

As more enterprises move to the cloud, the network scales in proportion. In fact, it becomes decentralized, making it more difficult to maintain visibility even as communications and connection increase. 

Without proper visibility, cloud databases may become misconfigured, which means external actors may gain access to those databases without authentication. Further, hackers may find weak parts of the cloud environment in which to slip into the network or plant a dwelling threat. 

Thankfully, SIEM adoption helps prevent these occurrences through its log management and aggregation capabilities. While trying to initially deploy SIEM across the entire network can create new problems, starting with valuable databases and expanding outwards can help uncover threats before they become truly hazardous.       

3. Global Security Threat Intelligence

Hackers don’t just wait for cybersecurity to catch up to them. They constantly innovate their malware to do more damage or evade more advanced cybersecurity perimeters. Additionally, many hackers actually purchase their malware from the Dark Web, creating an actual market demand for malicious creativity. 

Of course, your business’ cybersecurity can’t succeed if it always prepares for the last battle. Instead, you need SIEM solutions that provide sophisticated, in-depth threat intelligence feeds. These can help you maintain your SIEM solution so it knows to analyze for new kinds of threats and your incident response can respond to it quicker.      

4. Insider Threat Detection 

One of the most insidious cybersecurity challenges faced by businesses involves insider threats. These occur when an employee either maliciously or accidentally acts against the enterprise digitally or creates a security hole. In other cases, insider threats occur when a hacker exploits weak credentials to pose as an employee. Regardless, insider threats can go about relatively undetected because those users are (ostensibly) supposed to be in the network.

Of course, insider threats can also include known applications or devices; not all users are human, after all.  

SIEM solutions provide user and entity behavioral analysis (UEBA). This critical capability helps establish behavioral baselines of normal workflows and activities. If a user or entity violates this baseline, it automatically triggers an alert and may also trigger an activity freeze. Therefore, your security team can investigate quickly and potentially mitigate any damage caused.      

5. Automation

Finally, SIEM adoption facilitates the automation of threat hunting and incident response. While these solutions cannot replace human intelligence, it can supplement human intelligence; thus, it can help relieve the damage inflicted by the cybersecurity staffing crisis. The more your enterprise can automate cybersecurity, the more effective your strategies. 

For more information, download the SIEM Buyer’s Guide.


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