What is Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) ?

Security information and event management (SIEM) software supports threat detection and security incident response by collecting security log data from multiple sources to determine security threats. SIEM software helps organizations to assess their security posture, uncover security events and breaches, be alerted in real time of any changes that appear threatening and respond automatically to various threats, as well as providing a dashboard and access points to the SIEM applications.

Once bad activities are apprehended within an IT environment, SIEM tools give real-time security alerts to IT team to respond to any security threat.

16 Best SIEM Vendors & Solutions Ranked | SIEM Providers Tools List

• SolarWinds Security Event Manager SIEM
• Micro Focus ArcSight ESM
• SolarWinds Threat Monitor SIEM
• Splunk Enterprise Security SIEM
• LogRhythm NextGen SIEM
• IBM QRadar SIEM
• AlienVault Unified Security Management SIEM
• Sumo Logic SIEM
• RSA NetWitness Suite SIEM
• McAfee Enterprise Security Manager SIEM
• Securonix SIEM
• Exabeam SIEM
• Fortinet SIEM
• Rapid7 SIEM
• Micro Focus SIEM
• ArcSight SIEM

SIEM stands for Security Information and Event Management.

If security incident is identified and responded real-time, preventing cyber-attacks gains great fillip. Organizations need to detect such IT incidents and empower security teams to identity, analyse and respond to an attack’s route across the network.

In short,  incident detection and real-time response efforts is the key.

How this can be done? Security Information and Event management software is the key to automated mechanisms to improve threat detection and response.

SIEM, pronounced as SIM (‘e’ being silent), tool is used for scanning and interpreting security event information. When ‘security information’ is mentioned, it relates to:

• Log data or security resources
• Security-related alerts or notifications
• If/else rules or flows as well as vulnerabilities
• asset and user contexts.

There are 2 important words in this SIEM tool. Security information and event management. To address these two, a SIEM solution is a combined software of 2 technologies:

Security information management (SIM)

which is responsible for security-related data collection from a plethora of log files and resources.

Security event management (SEM)

gives the capability to ‘manage’ by keeping an eye on incidents and IT-related problems.

What is SIEM Software Tool?

Simple definition of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)?

As described above, a SIEM software is to automate aggregate data, from different sources and systems, and analyse that data to gather decision making ability to catch potential cyber-attacks.

How does SIEM Software tool work?

 

What is SIEM Monitoring?

No business is immune to cyber-attacks. In fact, it takes 175 days, on average, to detect an attack. What can be done to lessen the attack dwell time?

Invest focus on SIEM monitoring best practices to get high-speed forensic analytical capability to apprehend log data to monitor attack pattern and impact. It goes without saying why threat hunters find suspicious connections or IP addresses in majority of ‘variants’ of cyber-attacks.

Although there are other security controls like firewalls, Intrusion Defence Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) etc. but they come with limitations. When it comes to prevention of zero-day attack , single security controls do not give sure-shot information, by themselves, to pin-point malicious activity in a network.

By employing SIEM real-time threat monitoring, by keeping tabs on robust logs and important system events, to automate remediation for rapid incident response is crucial to streamline business security.

Analysis of indicators of compromise (IOC) is only realized with robust collection of IOCs, from different sources, and then monitor events or security alerts in realtime.

What is SIEM Log Management?

Commonly known as event logs, audit record or audit travels, SIEM platforms need to examine log data to identity security-related issues. Importance of security log analysis revolves around getting important intelligence about network, security application, Operating Systems (OS) and servers etc which are vulnerable to cyber-attack.

With built-in log management feature, SIEM software collects, analyses, reports and incident detection and response. By piecing these together, a SIEM tool, with its log analytical capacity log data management features, can detect smallest of indictor of compromise.

Why is SIEM tool important?

With IT breaches making headlines daily, keeping digital threat actors at bay by real-time incident response makes the role of a security information and event management (SIEM) software vital.

Talking about SIEM benefits, insight for compliance reporting also helps an organization’s IT infrastructure or financial information. Acronyms like Log Management System (LMS), Security Event Management (SEM) and Security Information Management (SIM) provide digital clarity by extracting actionable information keep data security ecosystem safe from cyber attacks.

• Visibility in real time
• Data Consolidation
• Correlation of Events
• Realtime notification of automated Security events/alerts

9 Advantages of using SIEM Software Tools

Extending why is SIEM important, following advantages of SIEM Solutions might be helpful in understanding how SIEM tools help by collecting security log events from numerous hosts:

Incident handling activities

Attaining and maintaining compliance reporting

Zero-day threat detection

Advanced persistent threats

forensics investigation

Faster Security Operation (SecOps)

Improved Threat Detection and Security Alerting

Better Network Visibility

Improved Compliance

SIEM Tools comparison chart

How to choose best SIEM solutions features?

Answer of which is the best SIEM software tool depends on including security controls, operating systems, and applications in an organization.

6 Key SIEM Features for Advanced Threats Detection

1. Real-Time Log Data Collection

Everything starts from log data collection, from different sources across the network, to detect and respond to Indicators of Compromise (IoC). With SIEM log data management, forensic data analysis gets help.

2. Log Correlation & Threat Intelligence

A key feature of modern SIEM tools is log correlation.  SIEM event log correlation aggregates log information data from network, applications, and devices and correlates to threat intelligent feeds. Advisable is to ask your SIEM vendor about threat intelligence feeds.

3. Real-Time Notification & Alerts

4. Improved Alert prioritization – Machine learning and AI (artificial intelligence)

5. Reporting & Dashboards – For MTTD and MTTR

6. Security Workflows

SIEM Providers: Best of 2022 and Beyond

16 Best SIEM Tools List To Improve Threat Detection

1. SolarWinds Security Event Manager SIEM
2. Micro Focus ArcSight ESM
3. SolarWinds Threat Monitor SIEM
4. Splunk Enterprise Security SIEM
5. LogRhythm NextGen SIEM
6. IBM QRadar SIEM
7. AlienVault Unified Security Management SIEM
8. Sumo Logic SIEM
9. RSA NetWitness Suite SIEM
10. McAfee Enterprise Security Manager SIEM
11. Securonix SIEM
12. Exabeam SIEM
13. Fortinet SIEM
14. Rapid7 SIEM
15. Micro Focus SIEM
16. ArcSight SIEM

SolarWinds Security Event Manager

Micro Focus ArcSight ESM

 

Splunk Enterprise Security SIEM

 

LogRhythm NextGen SIEM

 

IBM QRadar SIEM

 

AlienVault Unified Security Management SIEM

 

Sumo Logic SIEM

 

RSA NetWitness Suite SIEM

 

McAfee Enterprise Security Manager SIEM

 

Securonix SIEM

 

Exabeam SIEM

 

Fortinet SIEM

 

Rapid7 SIEM

 

SIEM Tools FAQs