Ad Image

What Will the Future of SIEM Hold for Enterprises?

What Will the Future of SIEM Hold for Enterprises?

What Will the Future of SIEM Hold for Enterprises?

What does the future of SIEM look like?

Like all branches of enterprise-level cybersecurity, SIEM has experienced significant changes in capabilities and priorities over the past few years. In its earliest days, SIEM emphasized its compliance capabilities. Global enterprises used SIEM solutions for their out-of-the-box compliance templates, which enabled easy reporting.

Download Link to SIEM Vendor Map

However, while compliance remains a critical capability in SIEM, its log management and threat detection now enjoy increased popularity among enterprises of all sizes and industries. With the cybersecurity paradigm transitioning from a prevent model to a detection and response model, perhaps this proves no great surprise.

Yet, to paraphrase philosopher David Hume, past experience can’t predict the future. Even within this current paradigm, the future of SIEM promises further evolution. What form will this evolution take?

We offer our predictions below.  

The Multifaceted Future of SIEM

In any discussion of the future of SIEM, we must also include a conversation on the future of enterprise IT environments. Indeed, the two exist intertwined in a symbiotic relationship; one affects the other with each technological innovation and adaptation.

Therefore, it proves helpful to consider the future of SIEM through the lens of network evolution. For example…

The Future of SIEM and the Cloud

While predictions concerning the future of SIEM remain controversial, predictions of enterprise IT environment futures prove comparatively consistent. In fact, experts almost universally agree the future of enterprises in the digital marketplace lies in digital transformation and cloud adoption. The dam broke on public cloud adoption, placing critical infrastructure on their platforms.  

The reasons for this widespread trend of transformations and transitions stem from their significant benefits.

For example, transitioning to the cloud removes significant pressure from enterprise servers, allowing for improved digital agility. Additionally, moving to the cloud allows enterprises to better track consumer trends, leverage their data more effectively, and facilitate their communications. Ultimately, digital transformation promises improved profitability—a desirable outcome for any enterprise.      

Of course, this future carries with it serious potential issues. According to technology research firm Gartner, by next year 95% of all breaches in the enterprise cloud shall begin with security misconfiguration.

To quote Cory Cowgill of Fusion Risk Management: “in other words, many companies will store their data in a perfectly secure cloud but will not take the necessary steps to ensure they are doing so securely.”

Moreover, enterprises which fail in their digital transformation can suffer from inefficient business processes, new security vulnerabilities, and decreased profits. Currently, hackers work to develop tools to better utilize compromised accounts.   

How Can SIEM Help Secure the Cloud?

Among the main cloud security capabilities of SIEM, visibility is chief among them.

Of course, visibility serves as one of the great overall cybersecurity benefits of SIEM. In this case, digital transformation and cloud adoption create a much more porous and expansive IT environment, within which hackers can conceal their cyber attacks. Security events hidden in plain text data may go unnoticed until far too late.

From a business process perspective, customer data and other leverageable data can remain hidden on your cloud-based IT environment silos. Indeed, with so much ingoing and outgoing traffic moving through these networks, finding, organizing, and analyzing data can prove a significant challenge.

SIEM’s log management allows your IT security team to collect data from all areas in your cloud or hybrid environments. Essentially, it turns on the light in the dark places in your network; hackers can’t easily conceal their attacks as your solution compiles, normalizes, and analyzes security event data from throughout the environment.

In addition, the log management of SIEM also allows you to uncover potentially lost data silos for customer data leveraging. So SIEM’s capabilities not only secure the future cloud environments of enterprises—it makes them more efficient.

Finally, with a deployed SIEM solution, your enterprise can utilize its machine learning automation to detect potential threats from compromised accounts and misconfiguration security holes.      

The Future of SIEM and SMBs

Often, small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) believe themselves immune to cyber attacks; after all, they reason, what do they have which appeals to digital thieves or saboteurs?

Unfortunately, this illustrates a case of wishful thinking. According to Switchfast Technologies, 46% of all SMBs will become the victim of a data breach. More perilously, 60% of SMBs become forced to shutter their operations within six months of a breach.

Due to this wishful thinking, ⅓ SMBs don’t have any cybersecurity protections whatsoever on their IT environments. Part of this gap stems from the perception of SIEM as only serving the interests and needs of large enterprises, as discussed above.

Another component of this issue is a comparative lack of cybersecurity talent in small businesses. SIEM carries a perception of being complicated to deploy and maintain; while this perception may not prove entirely justified, it does require some cybersecurity knowledge to maintain its correlation rules.    

The Evolution of SIEM for SMBs?

SMBs appropriately concerned about their cybersecurity and threat detection should look into hiring a managed security services provider (MSSP) to assist them. An MSSP can help business with limited resources to deploy and maintain their cybersecurity, saving them money on the extensive hiring process. Additionally, MSSPs can coordinate with your small business if they do detect a threat to help you mitigate the damage.  

According to Tyler Hardison of RedHawk, SMBs should also consider SIEM solutions working on developing more consolidated approaches. Some providers work to innovate their single-pane-of-glass interfaces for simpler monitoring, which may constitute a significant factor in the future of SIEM.

Threat Detection Improvements

For enterprises of all sizes, SIEM providers will most assuredly devote their future to improving their threat detection capabilities. As hackers innovate their cyber attacks to penetrate past enterprises digital perimeters, SIEM must provide another layer of cybersecurity between them and your digital assets.

Furthermore, the future of SIEM shall rely on the improvement of threat intelligence accumulation and delivery. Only with this intelligence can enterprise hope to protect themselves from the future dangers of cyber attacks.

If you would like to learn more about the present market and the possible future of SIEM, be sure to check out our Buyer’s Guide. We compile the top solution providers, detail their key capabilities, and our Bottom Lines.


Widget not in any sidebars
  

Share This

Related Posts