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Why Should Your SIEM Provide Actionable Insights?

UC San Diego Health Phishing Attack Exposes Medical Data

Why Should Your SIEM Provide Actionable Insights?

Why should your SIEM provide your enterprise with actionable insights? What even are “actionable insights”? And how can you use them best? 

Most cybersecurity professionals and IT security team members understand the general premise of SIEM solutions. SIEM aggregates security event logs from databases, applications, tools, and other network locations. Then, it normalizes that data for analysis, discovering points of connection which may indicate. 

Afterward, it sends a security alert for potential security events indicative of a breach, prompting faster investigations and response. 

Of course, SIEM does more than that core process, such as compliance. In fact, SIEM can actually help provide actionable insights to your IT security team. But what does this mean? Why does it matter?


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Why Should Your SIEM Provide Actionable Insights? 

Actionable Insights: What Are They? 

Actionable insights refer to the concrete steps a cybersecurity solution provides an IT security team in terms of the next steps. This might involve indicating where a breach might be occurring or has occurred, where a vulnerability might persist in your IT environment, and more. With these insights, your team can investigate, close breaches and vulnerabilities, and generally conduct more effective 

However, the keyword here is “actionable.” SIEM can generate hundreds of alerts a day but only provide a few (if any) actionable insights; these insights require context. Otherwise, your IT security members will be forced to crawl through dozens of log files looking for the information they need. 

How Insights Become Actionable

The key here is context. Every alert or note created by a SIEM solution comes from a specific context within the network, such as the users involved, the databases involved, and when the interactions took place. Without this context, it can be impossible to tell an actionable insight from a waste of time. 

Contextualization, especially real-time contextualization, as a capability takes care of some of the investigative legwork of analyzing security alerts as they are generated. They can provide IT security teams with relevant supplemental information associated with the security alerts. This can include the users involved, their enterprise departments, the location of their activity geographically and on the network, and the time of their suspicious activity.

Insights, Contextualization, and Next-Gen

Legacy SIEM solutions won’t offer the threat detection, security event correlation, alerting or contextualization your enterprise needs. Without these capabilities working in tandem and as part of a comprehensive cybersecurity platform, your enterprise will lack the actionable insights you need to discover breaches early and close vulnerabilities. 

As a first step, your enterprise should select and deploy a next-generation SIEM solution, working with your security to ensure its optimal performance. Second, make sure you optimize your correlation rules so you get the most actionable insights for your individual IT environment use case. 

To learn more, check out the Solutions Review SIEM Buyer’s Guide; we explore the top vendors in the market, including a Bottom Line analysis for each. Additionally, check out the SOAR Buyer’s Guide for solutions dedicated to discovering and bridging data silos in the network.


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