Cloud SIEM Solutions

Today’s enterprises face rapidly evolving threats to their cybersecurity at a moment in which they rely on their IT infrastructure more than ever. In fact, research from IDC indicates enterprise spending on the technology that enables digital transformation will have topped $1 trillion in 2018, an increase of 16.8% over the previous year. At the same time, the total global cost of cybercrime is expected to exceed a record $2 trillion this year, suggesting that those technologies driving digital transformations are at risk. 

What’s more, the cost of suffering from a cyberattack has only increased. According to the Ponemon Institute and IBM Security, the average total cost of a data breach to companies around the world rose 6.4% in 2018 to $3.86 million. Clearly, enterprises can ill afford to leave themselves vulnerable to technologically advanced bad actors. 

To that end, it’s incumbent upon you and your IT team to research, deploy, and manage cybersecurity solutions that can keep your systems, networks, and sensitive information secure. Regardless of your industry, the size of your business, or the scope of your team, protecting your organization from malicious online activity—activity that can cost enterprises millions of dollars—should be one of your top priorities. 

For many organizations, security information and event management (SIEM) offers the flexibility needed to deploy over complex digital environments, and the sophistication to effectively manage a wide range of threats. Indeed, SIEM tools collect, store, and analyze security information from across your organization in order to alert IT professionals to ongoing attacks and comb through log data to identify irregularities. 

As SIEM tools become more popular, however—the market for SIEM tools is expected to hit almost $6 billion by 2021—businesses that have integrated cloud computing into their operation need to ensure their cybersecurity platforms can account for this technology. If you and your team rely on the cloud at multiple levels of your business, it’s important that you learn more about cloud-based SIEM solutions. 

What is a SIEM solution?

A SIEM solution combines two types of cybersecurity technology, security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM). SIM sifts through log data in order to monitor for irregularities, which are identified based on rules set by the SIEM provider and your IT team. SEM analyzes data in real time in order to monitor for threats to your digital environment, generating warnings for IT professionals who can then evaluate those threats. 

By making SIM and SEM work in concert with one another, SIEM tools safeguard organizations against ongoing attacks while simultaneously monitoring for issues in log data. Such platforms provide end-to-end visibility over data gathered from a range of cybersecurity assets, including IoT devices, computer applications, firewalls, and antivirus software. By gathering this information and consolidating it in virtualized, user-friendly dashboards, SIEM tools make it possible for IT professionals to manage widespread, complex digital environments that would be too unwieldy to monitor and protect on their own. Furthermore, as enterprises invest further in cloud infrastructure and rely on off-site SaaS, SIEM providers are adapting their products to account for the changing nature of the digital environments they aim to protect. 

With its balance of SIM and SEM and its capacity for integration with emerging capabilities, SIEM technology makes an effective solution to the cybersecurity needs of enterprises of varying sizes. With that said, there are considerations that IT teams need to take into account. For instance, IT professionals will need to set some of the rules that SIEM tools use to analyze information and identify potential issues in log data. Those rules will change from one organization to the next, but it’s important to get them right so your SIEM platform doesn’t generate too many false positives and burn out your team.

What is SIEM as a service?

While it is possible to install a SIEM tool on-site, you can conveniently access SIEM as a service via the cloud. This means that the key functions of SIEM technology—SIM, SEM, and virtualization allowing for intuitive user control—are accessed via cloud computing technology from an off-site location. 

With cloud SIEM as a managed service, businesses have access to those tools and insight into their cybersecurity profile, but the managed services provider (MSP) controls the SIEM as a service function from a separate location, updating the business as necessary on security vulnerabilities.