In response to increased compliance concerns and the need to protect against security breaches, more companies are implementing SIEM technology to more easily collect, correlate and analyze data and security alerts from a central location. But once a SIEM is in place, how can organizations be sure it remains effective over time? That’s where a detailed threat assessment comes in.

At its best, SIEM tames the flow of data and information security staffers deal with to stay on top of threats and compliance. Rather than sifting through various tools’ configuration data and alerts, a SIEM is able to gather everything in one central place, make sense of it and then point staffers to the areas that need the most attention. It does this by collecting logs and alerts from a variety of security tools and infrastructure, normalizing and correlating them to provide company-specific context, and then presenting that data in easy-to-digest reports via a centralized dashboard-like console.

Consequently, many companies see SIEM as the answer to:

• Meeting compliance obligations: Whether it’s HIPAA, SOX, PCI, FISMA or some other standard or regulation, SIEM makes tracking and meeting compliance far more straightforward.
• Managing certifications: Because it provides a big picture view into the environment, organizations can more easily ensure their organizations adhere to risk management processes stipulated in certification standards like ISO 27001, ISO 27002, ISO 27003, etc.
• Managing and retaining logs: Instead of collecting, storing, analyzing and managing logs separately, SIEM brings everything together in one place to streamline the process.
• Continuous monitoring and incident response: Because SIEM is able to sift through the noise and bubble up fully correlated and contextualized alerts, IT can more easily and confidently monitor and respond to incidents in real or near-real time.
• Case management and ticketing systems: Most SIEMs integrate with case management or ticketing systems, enabling staffers to better track issues and resolve them faster.
• Policy enforcement: Because SIEM tracks all infrastructure and alerts across the organization, it makes it easier to validate security policy adherence over time.

But these benefits don’t just appear overnight. To be successful, SIEM requires quite a bit of care and feeding, both prior to deployment, when use cases are explored and codified, and as the organization grows and changes over time.

While initial SIEM deployment can be straightforward – collect logs, normalize data, correlate it and present it – organizations can’t just set it and forget it. To get the biggest ROI over time, they must continually invest in their SIEM by reviewing, observing and tweaking it to ensure it remains efficient and effective.

Regular Threat Assessments Optimize SIEM Effectiveness

One good way to ensure your SIEM’s effectiveness is to perform regular threat assessments, also called CTAPs, across all of the data feeds going to the tool, including logs, alerts and more. Such assessments can uncover holes in compliance requirements, processes, procedures, threats, vulnerabilities, service-level agreements (SLAs) and more – before they negatively impact your business.

Infogressive knows how important SIEM is to a strong compliance and security posture. We can perform a Cyber Threat Assessment Program to help you uncover issues and better understand their implications to your security. Infogressive also offers a managed SIEM service to provide real-time detection for you.