The reality is that cyber-attacks are a 24/7/365 threat to your business. A real-time threat monitoring program, such as a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system, that provides visibility into the network is now an essential layer of defense.
SIEM technology is one of the oldest security tools. Thousands of organizations implement these tools as part of their legacy technology stack. But today, many SIEM programs fail to produce usable data outputs within a business context or leverage important automation capabilities. IT teams simply don’t have the resources to produce these vital outputs.
SIEM as a Service, or Managed SIEM, is an increasingly popular option for organizations that want to outsource their cybersecurity monitoring and log management. But what is Managed SIEM, and what are the benefits of using it? In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into what Managed SIEM is and how you can optimize your SIEM capabilities to better benefit your organization.
Defining SIEM as a Service
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) as a service is a set of integrated security services, log management and monitoring tools that provide real-time incident response and threat detection. SIEM as a service or Managed SIEM helps businesses detect attacks and data breaches in their network faster.
The goal of Managed SIEM is to mitigate the risk of data breaches by allowing organizations to efficiently collect and analyze log data from all their digital assets. An excellent SIEM solution unifies your people, processes, and technologies, guaranteeing that every interaction is safe and visible— and making sure you have the right information at hand to respond to potential threats, faster.
How does it work?
SIEM systems aggregate and analyze log event information from devices, infrastructure, IT frameworks and applications. The program works to provide a holistic view of your IT network and detect any suspicious activity inside with active threat profiling, threat defense, and threat hunting services.
Effective SIEM technology examines all data, sorting threat activity according to its risk level to help security teams identify threat actors and mitigate risk quickly. When anomalous behavior is identified, an alert is generated for investigation.
Managed SIEM service providers can also help develop a database of assets with advanced classification capabilities.
Understand the difference Managed SIEM can make. Download Difenda’s M-SIEM service brief.
The advantages of a Managed SIEM
Managed SIEM allows organizations all the benefits of a world-class security operations program, previously only available to large enterprises with major capital investments.
Traditional in-house SIEM programs and strategies require significant effort to integrate multiple different security data sources. They also require an equal amount of internal cybersecurity expertise to be of real value in most organizations.
Managed SIEM services can help you if you have an expanding network, but your current program is not utilizing integrated threat hunting and incidence response. Or if your team simply doesn’t have the resources to manually investigate every log alert.
Some other benefits of M-SIEM include:
- Improved security data: SIEMs aggregate and normalize your security data, improving the potential for it to be analyzed and used in incident response workflows. The SIEM can then store normalized security data for extended analytics and reporting. This not only increases visibility but may also help with compliance.
- Increased visibility: SIEM systems mitigate the risk of threat actors hiding in dark spaces within your network because they are collecting security event data from everywhere in the network. It then works to analyze this data, effectively highlighting those dark spaces.
- Improved compliance: SIEM will help you meet demanding compliance requirements. It does this by improving your security posture and helping monitor your organizational environment.
- Fewer false positive alerts: Almost 50% of your security alerts are just “noise”. Machine learning technology can reduce the amount of time your team is spending on false positives, by only highlighting legitimate threats.
- Dedicated Support: With SIEM as a service, your account is assigned a dedicated account team to ensure your valued outcomes are always in focus.
Discover the core benefits of effective SecOps-as-a-service operations in Difenda’s Managed SIEM eBook.
Cloud-Based VS. On-Premise SIEM Deliveries
You’ve probably heard a lot about cloud-based security information and event management (SIEM) solutions lately. But what’s the difference between cloud-based and on-premise SIEM? And which one is right for your organization? Here’s a breakdown of the pros and cons of both delivery models, so you can make the best decision for your business.
On-premises SIEM solutions offer organizations complete control over their important information and data because it is stored and analyzed on their own premises. Your organization also keeps control over the whole cybersecurity team by keeping them in-house. The problem is that on-prem security programs can be very expensive when it comes to time, training and resources.
SIEM solutions require consistent updates to ensure that all of its security systems are up to date and compliant. These updates and patches are time-consuming and often result in pauses in log collection. This is not a problem for cloud-based SIEMs since the updates are taken care of by the cloud vendor or your SIEM as a service team.
Plus, with cloud-based SIEM solutions, your organization immediately gains access to expert knowledge and there is no need to train your employees on how to maximize the selected SIEM platform. The cloud also allows for faster custom implementations as the service comes with a team of experts that can configure it to your needs.
With more technologies moving to the cloud and the adoption of multi-cloud environments increasing, your best bet is to invest in a cloud SIEM solution, to meet your organizational objectives.
Microsoft Azure Sentinel as your SIEM
Microsoft Azure Sentinel is a SIEM and Security Orchestration and Automated Response (SOAR) system in Microsoft’s cloud platform. Therefore, it enables businesses to not only collect data about security threats but also automatically respond to security events without human assistance. With Microsoft Sentinel, you get a single solution for threat visibility, proactive hunting, attack detection and threat response.
This program provides a bird’s-eye view across security networks, alleviating the stress of increasingly sophisticated attacks, alert fatigue, and time-consuming investigations.
Choosing Azure Sentinel as your M-SIEM allows you to easily:
- Collect more data across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multi-cloud environments.
- Detect previously undetected threats using Microsoft’s analytics and threat intelligence.
- Investigate threats with artificial intelligence, and hunt for suspicious activities at scale.
- Respond to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation processes.
Discover how Difenda helped a large SaaS firm eliminate operational challenges from its legacy technology stack by implementing Managed SIEM with Microsoft Sentinel. Download our latest customer win!
Are you looking to maximize the SIEM capabilities of your E3 or E5 license?
If you have a Microsoft Security E3 or E5 license, you are already paying for Microsoft Sentinel; all you need to do is activate it! What are you waiting for?
Once engaged, don’t let hiring qualified professionals, implementing best practices and maintaining critical infrastructure slow you down. Just getting started or already deployed, Difenda can design, implement, configure and optimize your Microsoft Sentinel program to secure your future and develop a database of your assets with classification capabilities.
How do you get started? In order to optimize your Managed SIEM capabilities, you need to start with the fundamentals. Deploy a Microsoft 365 Gap Assessment to address gaps in your program and engage the Microsoft Security tools you aren’t using. Highlight your valuable data and identify your crown jewels so your service provider can identify and prioritize important remediations. This will provide you with a solid foundation to start maturing your security program.
The next step would be to focus on automation capabilities. The workflow built into many Managed SIEM provides integration and automation capabilities that significantly reduce the time between detection and response, and actually help you prioritize remediations.
If you already have Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender but are looking to extend your Microsoft security investment, you can achieve so much more with Managed Detection and Response. MDR takes your managed security one step further by identifying latent risks in systems, applications, and activities that can lead to an attack. It also utilizes advanced automation and orchestration capabilities to actually make remediations on your behalf.
Difenda can help Microsoft customers maximize their Microsoft license capabilities wherever they are in their security journey with tailored guidelines to do more with less. Download our End-to-End Microsoft Security eBook.
Difenda’s Managed SIEM
Difenda Managed SIEM, powered by Microsoft Azure Sentinel, offers an enterprise-grade suite of managed threat detection services that unifies your people, processes, and technologies, guaranteeing that every interaction is safe and visible—and making sure you have the right information at hand to respond to potential threats, faster.
Difenda’s Managed SIEM, helps your business:
- Develop a quantitative and qualitative understanding of organizational risks posed by people, assets, data, and technologies prior to an incident
- Implement a set of advanced security controls to monitor, identify, and mitigate risks through intelligent threat detection and threat hunting
- Capture and secure all relevant security information for future use
- Increased visibility of your entire IT network with The Difenda Shield platform
Difenda M-SIEM provides forensic, audit, and compliance benefits by reliably capturing and securely retaining all relevant security event information for future use.
