IT departments clearly have its hands full with daily tasks spanning from managing computer systems, maintaining the network infrastructure, troubleshooting issues, managing SIEM to hardware and software maintenance, both network and device protection and much more. With rapidly growing digital footprints and infrastructures, IT departments’ responsibilities won’t be slowing down any time soon.
In correlation with the growing footprint, there is an expected exponential increase in cyber-attacks. With potentially devastating attacks becoming daily occurrences, IT departments are plagued with continuous monitoring of environments. It’s a necessary but the critical and time-consuming process of filtering through alerts and potential threats leads to fatigue, missed critical alerts and high employee turnover.
Why use a SIEM?
Security information and event management (SIEM) offers both insight into and a track record of activities in the environment. SIEM is a combination of security event management (SEM) and security information management (SIM). SEM is an analysis of log and event data in real time to provide threat monitoring, event correlation and incident response. SIM collects, analyzes and reports on log data. Combining a SEM and SIM together, IT departments can centrally and comprehensively monitor if there’s an attack on the environment.
ManagING a SIEM vs. A ManagED SIEM
Traditionally, IT departments or cybersecurity teams take on the responsibility of managing a SIEM, on top of its other strategic duties. However, as vulnerabilities and threats evolve the task has become more daunting. Days are spent sorting through a high number of alerts to determine if the threat is real. Since positive alerts create a huge security risk, it’s important to carefully check each alert. With the abundance of false positives plaguing SIEMs, people are spending all their time going through alerts rather than progressing on strategic projects.
Managing a SIEM in-house results in the focus of the department being on tactical initiatives rather than strategical projects. Organizations can outsource the task to a managed SIEM service provider, creating time for critical projects.
Why a managed SIEM makes more sense:
1. So. Many. Alerts.
A main feature of SIEM is to notify the team of security alerts. With the number of attacks and alerts increasing daily, the task of monitoring alerts becomes more challenging. Rarely is an alert a real threat and therefore teams spend time investigating false positives.
A managed SIEM like BriteProtect first expertly tunes the software to nearly eliminate false positives. Then, a team of cybersecurity engineers vets the remaining alerts to validate its legitimacy. Only true alerts are brought to the attention of the organization’s security team. This saves incredibly valuable time for security teams.
2. Focus on strategical projects.
With the task of monitoring alerts in the hands of someone else, the team has more time for strategical projects. Instead of needing people around the clock looking at logs, those talented individuals can be used for a variety of critical tasks. Stay tuned for our next post that outlines different projects IT teams can focus on instead.
3. Get the most ROI on your security initiatives.
Companies have never had to prioritize and allocate large amounts of budget to cybersecurity initiatives and projects. Investing in a SIEM is the right decision but get the most out of it and go beyond monitoring it in-house. A finely-tuned SIEM is more beneficial and worth more than just implementing an out-of-box SIEM. In addition to the cost of a SIEM, get the most ROI out of your talented team and fully utilize their skills for those strategic projects mentioned above.
There’s no question that a SIEM is essential to an organization’s security environment, but is it necessary to have your IT team spending hours monitoring alerts? Our managed SIEM service, BriteProtect can do the monitoring for you and alert your team when there’s a viable threat.
