Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

5 min readNov 20, 2021

What is cloud security?

Cloud security is protecting the resources hosted on cloud platforms. These resources include applications, infrastructures, or databases. Organizations can secure their own data on the cloud by employing a combination of rules, techniques, and technologies to monitor & protect the data that enters and exits the cloud.

Cloud service providers many implement safety measures like encryption, intrusion detection, advanced firewalls, event logging, compliance to security regulations, and also physical security in data centers to maintain security in the cloud.

What is SIEM?

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions use rules and statistical correlations to turn log entries, and events from security systems, analyzing security-related into any accessible information. This information helps security department to detect threats, manage incident response, perform forensic investigation on past security incidents, and prepare audits for any compliance purpose.

SIEM also handles log management and analysis superbly. SIEM collects and analyzes log data generated throughout the organization’s technology infrastructure, from host systems and applications and network and security devices such as firewalls, event types, IP addresses, memory, processes and more and antivirus filters.

The software delivers on two main objectives like

· It provide different reports on security-related incidents and events, such as unsuccessful and failed logins or entries, any other suspicious activity or possible malicious activities

· It send alerts if any analysis shows that an activity runs against predetermined rule sets and thus this indicates that a security issue is arrived

Why is SIEM important?

By combining security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM), security information and event management (SIEM) which offers real-time monitoring and analysis and tracking of all the events and logging of security data of organization for compliance & auditing purposes.

SIEM is a security solution that helps organizations to recognize its security threats and vulnerabilities before it gets a chance to damage any business operations. SIEM uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate many of the manual processes related with threat detection and incident response .

Now, SIEM has became more matured than the log management tools that preceded it. It is a greatly efficient data orchestration system for managing evolving threats as well as regulatory compliance.

SIEM Use Cases :

With a SIEM solution, your security department has a bird’s eye view of many common security vulnerabilities and threats and also can separate those requiring attention from the normal low-level noise of everyday activity.

You can detect suspicious happenings such as:

Logins and logouts
User additions, deletions, and privilege changes
Services starting and stopping
Roles added or changed
Malware and threats
Bandwidth

Benefits of SIEM

Some of the benefits of SIEM are as following:

· Centralized AWS security monitoring: With monitoring data from services like CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and ELB being pulled to a unified platform. Instead of going through the each and every log manually, we are now able to review logs and search for anomalies quicker with this level of integration.

· Threat intelligence for AWS: The AWS environment which has been designed can be monitored closely for potential changes. When the changes made aren’t complying with security policies, we get instant notifications.

· Support for multi-cloud setups: It means SIEM can now be used to reduce blind spots and allow for a more holistic approach in cloud management. SIEM can be also used from the beginning to complete the whole process of migrating to the cloud even easier.

· Security compliance in the cloud: With common standards like HIPAA and PCI DSS supported natively, adjusting your cloud environment to satisfy the proper requirements of these security standards becomes an easy task to accomplish with the help of SIEM.

· It makes it easier to assemble and analyze security information to keep systems safe — all of an organization’s information goes into a centralized repository where it is stored and easily accessible;

· It can be used by corporations for a different of use cases that revolve around data or logs, including security programs, audit and compliance reporting, help desk and network troubleshooting;

· It supports huge amounts of data so organizations can also continue to scale out and increase their data;

· It provides threat detection and security alerts for companies

· It can perform detailed forensic analysis in the event of any major security breaches occurred.

The future of SIEM:

The future of SIEM include the following:

· Improved orchestration:

Presently, SIEM provides companies with its basic workflow automation only. However, as companies continue to grow, SIEM will need to offer additional capabilities. For an example, because of the increased commercialization of AI and machine learning, SIEM tools will have to provide faster orchestration to the many different departments within a company the same level of protection. Moreover, the security protocols and the execution of those protocols will be even quicker, as well as more effective and efficiently.

· Better collaboration with managed detection and response tools.

As threats of hacking and unauthorized access continue to grow, it’s important for organizations to implement a two-tier approach to detect and analyze security threats. A organizations ‘s IT team can implement SIEM in-house, while a managed service provider (MSP) can implement the MDR tool.

· Enhanced cloud management and monitoring.

SIEM vendors will improve the cloud management and monitoring capabilities of their tools to better meet the security needs of all organizations that use the cloud.