Is Safety Data and Occasion Administration (SIEM) replaceable? The reply to this query will not be going to be a easy sure or no. The closest scientific research that approximates a solution to this query is a survey that reveals enterprises’ love-hate relationship with SIEM. Solely 21.6 p.c of respondents within the stated survey say that they’re absolutely glad with the SIEM techniques they’re utilizing, and 31.9 p.c say they’re getting over 80 p.c of the worth they anticipate from it.
It could be inaccurate to say SIEM is replaceable as a result of many—greater than a majority based mostly on the survey cited above—are satisfied that they’re getting one thing from it. Nevertheless, it could not be fully true to say that SIEM is indispensable, as a result of many additionally assume that they don’t get important worth out of it.
Organizations which are searching for the same or probably higher safety resolution can contemplate SIEM options, particularly people who have the next options.
Built-in menace intelligence platform (TIP)
TIP is a crucial cybersecurity expertise designed for the gathering, aggregation, and group of menace intelligence from numerous sources and in numerous codecs. It allows correct and environment friendly menace identification, which ends up in higher investigation and response outcomes. TIP performs an necessary function in making safety operations extra environment friendly and less complicated to run.
Ideally, TIP needs to be cloud-based to make sure steady and bidirectional safety data motion. Which means that it doesn’t solely collect menace intelligence; it additionally serves as a safety knowledge supply for numerous customers. The menace intelligence platforms of main safety suppliers normally evolve with inputs from inside analysis, business feeds, open supply feeds, and menace data shared by clients. In addition they construct up reputability by being menace intelligence sources to enterprise clients, authorities companies, and MSSP companions.
Cloud-native knowledge lake
Menace intelligence requires beneficiant storage and effectively retrievable knowledge. Large quantities of knowledge must be saved as they’re collected from numerous sources together with endpoints, apps, customers, in addition to cloud sources. Easy knowledge warehousing and cloud databases is not going to reduce it. It’s advisable to have a cloud-native knowledge lake that may deal with a variety of knowledge sorts and codecs and stay extremely out there and quickly accessible even with long-term knowledge.
A cloud-based knowledge lake is often elastic and microservice-based. Which means that as knowledge quantity will increase, knowledge dealing with stays environment friendly as a result of new knowledge is added in nodes that hook up with clusters. This ensures that search and knowledge retrieval efficiency will not be affected no matter how large the information quantity is. Forensic evaluation and menace searching efficiency doesn’t decelerate due to the vastness of the compiled knowledge.
Knowledge centralization, normalization, and enrichment
Efficient SIEM entails the correlation of safety alerts and occasions. That is normally finished routinely with the assistance of synthetic intelligence. The issue with typical SIEM is that it’s troublesome to develop significant machine studying or AI to deal with correlation due to the number of knowledge collected.
To deal with this problem, it is very important forcibly centralize, then normalize and enrich knowledge. These steps are important to scale back knowledge complexity and make uncooked, disjointed, and unorganized knowledge readily usable in AI fashions.
Complete safety knowledge gathering
Open XDR is touted as one of many wonderful options to SIEM due to its emphasis on complete knowledge assortment and open structure. It’s an evolution of XDR (Prolonged Detection and Response), which Gartner outlined as “a unified safety incident detection and response platform that routinely collects and correlates knowledge from a number of proprietary safety elements.”
Open XDR provides the benefit of overlaying not solely proprietary safety elements however all present safety elements. That is necessary as a result of safety data and safety occasion administration at current can’t be restricted to proprietary elements. Assault surfaces proceed to broaden unpredictably, so it makes excellent sense to make use of a system whose protection proactively grows with the modifications within the menace panorama.
Open structure
One other attribute associated to Open XDR that can also be very important in a SIEM various is open structure. Having an open structure is critical to have the ability to add detection, correlation, intelligence, and different capabilities relying on what a company requires for the time being.
It’s a given that the majority organizations use safety options from completely different distributors. They have already got present safety elements earlier than they resolve to undertake SIEM or a SIEM various. It’s counterintuitive to ditch present options, that are doubtless not low-cost or obtained totally free, to utilize a brand new platform. Not solely is that this a expensive waste, however it’s also completely pointless.
Open structure implies that the seamless integration of safety options is feasible. It additionally helps the swapping and upgrading of elements. There is no such thing as a have to drop something if they are often helpful within the safety data and occasion administration course of being carried out. New features could also be added if they don’t seem to be at present out there.
Unified safety operations
Varied safety operation instruments work higher when they’re operated underneath a unified platform. SIEM various can unify person entity and conduct analytics (UEBA), endpoint detection and response (EDR), safety orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), community detection and response (NDR), and different cybersecurity instruments. A number of safety operations will be undertaken in the identical platform and centralize the information generated within the course of to supply stories and analyses extra quickly.
The core thought of conducting SIEM is to mix safety data administration (SIM) and safety occasion administration (SEM). Thus, data dealing with and response, ideally, needs to be undertaken inside the similar platform. It’s not smart to spend money on a safety platform that supposedly unifies safety operations solely to conduct some processes utilizing separate functions.
In conclusion
There are viable options to SIEM. One instance of that is Open XDR, which provides a number of benefits in comparison with typical SIEM, particularly for individuals who favor to not sort out the complexities of constructing a bespoke SIEM platform with plugins and instruments that tackle particular wants of their organizations. For enterprises which are searching for different choices, it could assist to recollect the options, features, or attributes described above.
