What Makes a Next Gen SIEM?

In the years that followed, the system is introduced that provided both security log management and analysis (SIM) and event management (SEM), to create Security Information Event Management (SIEM) solutions. SIEM technology can aggregate both historical log data and real-time events and determine relationships that can help security specialists to identify anomalies, vulnerabilities, and incidents.

The primary focus is on security incidents and events, such as successful or failed logins, malware activities, or privilege escalations. These can be sent as notifications or alerts or discovered by security analysts using the SIEM platform’s visualization and tools. However, security analysts need to spend a lot of time manually between solutions and screens while detecting threats and breaches, defining the manual rules to find security threats. In the meanwhile, the supply of cybersecurity experts needed to understand this complex process has not been able to catch with growing demand.

Compared to a SIEM, which struggles to meet today’s security challenges, a next-generation SIEM improves your security visibility, mobility, and security posture, while reducing management and security analyst workload.

So, what exactly makes SIEM the next generation?

Since SIEM is a mature technology now, the next generation of SIEMs shall provide new capabilities and open big data-based architecture.

Next-Generation SIEM Architecture

A next-generation SIEM is built on a big data platform that can handle the massive volumes of data produced by enterprises. This allows for the consumption and analysis of hundreds of terabytes of data in real-time and supports economical long-term data retention.

A next-generation SIEM provides customers with the benefits of data portability by storing data using an open data model. This means that you only need to maintain a single copy of your security data, and that data will still be available for other applications to use as needed.

A next-generation SIEM can be deployed on bare-metal servers or virtualization environments and allows for improvements to that platform to be safely incorporated. Does not require you to purchase expensive, proprietary hardware.

Next-Generation SIEM Behavioural Analytics Capabilities

A next-generation SIEM solution leverages machine learning techniques to sift through massive volumes of data. These techniques include real-time behavior-based security analytics that uses a combination of unsupervised, supervised, and statistical algorithms that are custom developed for cybersecurity to find both known and unknown threats.

Behavioral analytics start by learning what is normal in your environment and using that information to build a baseline of what normal behavior looks like. The solution can then compare subsequent behavior against the baseline and detect what is abnormal. For example, do people in your organization from marketing generally access research and development prototypes? In some organizations, this could be normal behavior. For other organizations, it could be abnormal and a reason for security researchers to dig deeper into that user.

Behavioral analytics capabilities that use for next-gen SIEM are User and Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA) which advanced SIEMs go beyond rules and correlations, leveraging AI and deep learning techniques to look at patterns of human behavior. This can help detect insider threats, targeted attacks, and fraud. That’s to say, instead of only tracking users, UEBA also tracks other entities such as endpoints, applications, and networks to find threats.

Next-Generation SIEM Incident Response Capabilities

A next-generation SIEM platform provides automated incident response capabilities to help your security operations center (SOC) team respond rapidly to incidents. The playbooks included in the solution should be based on security industry best practices and include tight integrations with third-party solutions such as network security tools, endpoint protection devices, scanning solutions, security orchestration and automation platforms, and threat intelligence solutions. They will contain recommended actions for forensic analysts and incident responders to take as they respond to threats. Next-generation SIEM playbooks will also include optional automated response actions. This means that, based on the alert, a well-defined set of actions can be taken automatically – such as collecting machine and network logs, quarantining devices, suspending user actions, and more – which helps incident responders resolve the incident quicker.

Security Orchestration and Automation (SOAR) is next-gen SIEMs integrated with enterprise systems and automate incident response. For example, the SIEM might detect an alert for ransomware and perform containment steps automatically on affected systems, before the attacker can encrypt the data.

Incredibly fast-evolving technologies emerge new security solutions and new capabilities every day. The SIEM concept, which officially entered our lives in 2005 with the report of Gartner, eases security analysts’ jobs against cyber threats with its new capabilities to prevent security vulnerabilities that are increasing day by day. In a world where even daily life has evolved into automation, the assets used by organizations are increasingly diversifying. This means that more new capabilities will be arising to add to SIEM.