Where in Your Environment Should You Deploy SIEM First?

Where in your environment should you deploy SIEM first?

The benefits of SIEM can’t be overstated; it remains a critical tool for gaining cybersecurity insights and maintaining network visibility. To simplify its working, SIEM’s log management aggregates security event information from across the network. Then, it normalizes this data, ensuring it’s all working in the same language, to ease analysis. After that, it analyzes the accumulated data for connections between the security events, finding patterns which indicatative possible data breaches. 

From there, the solution sends the business’ IT security team an alert to prompt their investigation and (if necessary) response. However, SIEM can create two new challenges through these alerts without proper monitoring and modification. 

First, SIEM can create false positives. After all, it’s not human intelligence and can become confused by incongruities in behavior even if it’s innocent. These false positives can bury legitimate leads and waste the time and energy of your IT security team; both resources are limited. Thankfully, this can be handled through careful maintenance of the SIEM solution’s correlation rules. 

Second, SIEM can generate more alerts than your IT security team can adequately examine. Imagine dozens, perhaps hundreds, of alerts every day, all of which require attention and investigation. It’s overwhelming, and as such could cause serious burnout. 

One way to help alleviate both problems is through the careful deployment of the SIEM solution. Instead of deploying SIEM everywhere, you begin with deploying it in a few select locations. But that raises the question: Where in your environment should you deploy SIEM first?

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Where in Your Environment Should You Deploy SIEM First?

1. Sensitive Databases

First, SIEM should keep a watch over the most sensitive databases in your IT environment. This shouldn’t surprise anyone; hackers are going to try to target these databases above all, so you need to know who accessed what, when, and how they work with that data. 

2. Cloud Databases

If we had a nickel for every time a breach began because of a misconfigured cloud database, we would have a comfortable retirement ahead of us. You need to ensure you know where your cloud databases are, what configuration rules they employ, and who interacts with them. SIEM offers the necessary insights to keep an eye on these powerful yet dangerous resources. 

3. Privileged Users

Eventually, your enterprise should use its user and entity behavioral analysis (UEBA) tools to monitor all of the users in your network. However, when deploying your SIEM for the first time, you should focus on the most powerful users in the environment, whose accounts could do the most damage. 

That could be a good rule of thumb in general when considering where to deploy your SIEM first; think about what could cause the most damage in the wrong hands and work from there. 

4. Key Applications 

Finally, SIEM works best by aggregating security event information from relevant sources throughout the IT environment. This means drawing from other cybersecurity solutions and tools, such as firewalls, login portals, and antivirus. Drawing from these sources will provide a clearer picture of where you need to focus. 

Learn more in the SIEM Buyer’s Guide. 

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