What is SIEM?

What is SIEM? The help that you need to keep your business safe

SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) is a kind of software whose purpose is to provide organizations and corporations with useful information. “About what?” you may wonder. Well, about potential security threats related to your business networks. SIEM does this through data collation and by prioritizing all kinds of dangers or threats.

In general, we already answered the question “what is SIEM?”, but how does it do it? The answer is that it does it by means of studying security data that was previously centralized and obtained from several systems, including antivirus applications, firewalls or any type of intrusion prevention.

With SIEM working, you can proactively manage and join in investigating potential failures or vulnerabilities in your system, circumspectly forewarning your company and your customers. Nobody wants data leaks and with SIEM you can avoid them. If you’re a nerd like me, you can think of SIEM as a benign Eye of Sauron fixing its fiery pupil on your overall system situation, in order to help you focus efforts where more help is needed.

What is SIEM? Where does it come from?

Where does the term “SIEM” come from? Well, you can find it already in a 2005 article, called “Improve IT Security with Vulnerability Management”. The term is the sum of concepts such as “Security Event Management (SEM)” and “Security Information Management (SIM)”. SIEM is made up by the best of both doctrines.

If you know SEM, you will know that it is in charge of covering monitoring and event relation in real time. At the same time, it warns of configuration and console views related to undertaken activities. SIM, on the other hand, is responsible for collecting those data and taking them to the next level. It includes the storage, study and production of reports on the results.

What is SIEM? Why is it important?

Well, we all know that no one is free from evil because, my friend, evil never rests. That is not a secret. Superman knows it. And we would all be shaking under our beds at home, going nuts with those security threats that continually increase and that can come from anywhere, if it were not for such blessed arrangements like SIEM.

One of the obsessions we have seen grow is that, accidentally, a not very skilled employee misconfigures security settings, exposing data that may be vulnerable to an attack by someone more skilled. So that this does not happen and the unskilled employee can breathe easy without jeopardizing his position, IT experts have developed different systems to defend us against intrusions and the whirlwind of multiple leaks that threaten us. Bravo for IT experts! The bad thing is that this type of protection systems can generate such a necessary amount of information from monitoring that IT teams cannot cope with it. They have to take in all this data, analyze it and interpret it, in order to recognize problems strictly speaking. This is not feasible for under-staffed IT Security teams. A core volume of security data that must be analyzed and filtered to reach actionable alerts, all quickly and effectively… how to say… not compute.

And this is where our good friend SIEM appears, the most awaited software by IT security teams in the world. With SIEM, IT experts are provided with an effective method that automates processes and centralizes security efforts. An ideal way to help simplify the immeasurable task of protecting sensitive information. SIEM is the advantage that helps professionals distinguish between a low or low risk threat and one that can end up setting your business on fire, worst case scenario.

What is SIEM? Its key features

The SIEMs available in the market have in common certain points, the most important for your goals. Among these, you may find:

• The ability to centralize and expose potential and most urgent threats.
• Distinguishing between threats that need to be deal with and those that are only a pleasing background noise.
• Escalate and report threats to the appropriate security engineers so you don’t waste time addressing the issue.
• Contextualize security events and thus provide an option for an adapted and well-argued resolution.
• Document in a log each event that took place and how it was handled until solved.

After getting into the technological ins and outs, are you hungry for more? Would you like to go even further in the world of technology? What about spending a couple of minutes to know what computing system monitoring is and why it is also very important?

Monitoring systems – do not mistake them with SIEMs, because they are another different type of software– are in charge of supervising technology (hardware, networks and communications, operating systems or applications, for example) in order to analyze their operation and performance, and to detect and alert about possible errors. And this leads us to Pandora FMS, that wonderful tool thanks to which this blog is possible.

Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring system, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.

Want to know more about what Pandora FMS has to offer you? Find out by entering here.

Or if you have to monitor more than 100 devices, you can also enjoy a FREE 30-day Pandora FMS Enterprise TRIAL. Get it here.

And remember that if you have a small number of devices to monitor you can use the OpenSource version of Pandora FMS. Find out more here.

Don’t hesitate to submit your inquiries. The Pandora FMS team will be happy to serve you!