Cloud SIEM: How Cloud-Based Security Information and Event Management can benefit your Business

| Dimitri Antonenko Last updated 13 Jul, 2022

As businesses adopt cloud-first strategies, SIEM solutions are increasingly deployed via the cloud to meet the increasing demand. Enterprises wish to take advantage of cloud-based SIEM’s financial and operational benefits.

If your existing SIEM solutions are steeped in high operational costs and complex management, you should consider switching to Cloud SIEM. Businesses that have integrated cloud computing into their operations can benefit from exploring how cloud-based SIEM solutions can scale their business.

Understanding Security Information And Event Management (SIEM)

SIEM is an acronym for security information and event management. It enables next-generation detection, analytics, and response for companies.

SIEM software combines security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) to analyze real-time security alarms generated by applications and network devices.

SIEM software compares events to rules and analytics engines and indexes them for sub-second search, enabling the detection and analysis of sophisticated threats using globally gathered data.

Security teams get insight into and record activity inside their IT environment by offering data analysis, event correlation, aggregation, reporting, and log management.

SIEM software can have a variety of functions and advantages, including the following:

Consolidation of a large number of data points
Custom dashboards and control of alert workflows
Compatibility with other items

How Cloud SIEM can benefit your Business

With businesses rapidly migrating their existing workload to the cloud, cloud-based computing has indefinitely become the new normal.

It no longer makes sense to download cloud-retrieved logs onto an On-Premise based SIEM and then start identifying security threats.

Instead, natively monitoring the cloud becomes a lot easier and more cost-effective. Cloud-SIEM goes a step further and allows your enterprise to leverage cloud capabilities and keep your environment more secure fully.

Instant Deployment

Generally, SIEM deployments can take more than three months. A significant chunk of that period is invested in shipping, fulfillment, and the initial set-up.

The delay occurs due to larger-sized deployments, fewer dedicated resources, or some skills gaps.

SaaS-based SIEM can be deployed rapidly without needing to ship, receive, install or configure appliances (physical or virtual).

It does not require installation, offloading is handed over to the third-party vendor, only log sources must be directed to the cloud, and licensing is easier than an on-premise installation.

This way, businesses can immediately start to see the value. SaaS-based SIEM provides immediate access to fully functional SIEM solutions.

Defense against Cloud-Specific Attacks

Emerging cloud technologies and cloud-based infrastructure have brought new variations of previously well-known attack tactics to life.

Cloud SIEM tools are equipped with correlation use cases for events that may signify attacks and security incidents.

Cloud Threat Intelligence

A cloud-based SIEM service allows teams to effectively search for compromised assets based on the signals provided, the events within the cloud infrastructure, or the events gathered via workload.

Teams can also easily search for any communication that may have taken place with malicious IP addresses and domains.

Cloud-centric threat intelligence operates to detect and remediate incidents based on gathered intelligence.

Deep integration with Cloud Provider APIs

A cloud-based SIEM platform can seamlessly integrate with cloud provider services and APIs. This allows for better streaming of events towards a central analyzing environment and more accurate event detection.

Businesses attain the most out of their cloud-based SIEM tools by looking for autoscaling ingestion of event data capabilities.

Cloud SIEM platforms are built on a microservices architecture that offers resource elasticity that businesses can scale up or down as needed.

Reduced reaction time to advanced threats

With on-premise SIEM, security incidents are brought to light only after an operational disruption occurs. Security logs responsible for identifying and filtering threats are limited in use in the face of advanced threats that sneak by the network and are already inside.

On the other hand, Cloud-based SIEM integrates data from varied sources to identify insider misbehavior, hacked accounts, compromised hosts, and fraud campaigns.

This allows businesses to react much faster and neutralize the damage before severe damage occurs. Cloud SIEM will enable you to be proactive instead of reactive when identifying and eliminating system and infrastructure threats.

Although log data is essential to SIEM, collecting and managing logs is just one type of security data. Cloud-based SIEM is equipped with the ability to correlate network flows with vulnerability data.

Avoid Hardware Obsolescence

Newer software demands better performance and capacity to keep up with the ever-evolving security threats, and hardware can’t keep up. SIEM solutions deployed on-premise would require a refresh somewhere down the line.

An entire hardware overhaul consumes security staff bandwidth that could have otherwise been used for real-time monitoring. Cloud SIEM being a SaaS, helps you stay ahead without worrying about your hardware going obsolete.

Eliminate Resource Costs & Needs

With cloud-based SIEM, maintenance costs and administration efforts are handled by a third-party vendor.

SIEM experts are now offering pricing packages with unlimited data capacity based on the number of employees or IP addresses. As a result, this is far more cost-effective than On-Premise based SIEM tools.

Once SIEM solutions log events and alerts, the security operations team must understand and make sense of them.

This requires them to be trained on operating on-premise SIEM solutions, which is a long and complicated process. Cloud SIEM makes immediate sense from alerts and events and creates a prioritized task list.

The task list helps with proactive threat-hunting activities and reactive corrections. This way, businesses can significantly save on resources and onboarding costs.

Ability to Scale

Cloud-based SIEMs can dramatically scale the amount of data they manage as and when needed. They do not run into the difficulties associated with traditional SQL-based architectures.

Matured data lakes expand SIEM capacity to adopt more data sources. SIEMs can now collect log data for new applications or even use new data sources as part of advanced analytics.

Unified Monitoring & Correlation

Cloud-based platforms are better equipped to aggregate data across varied environments, including hybrid infrastructures. This happens because solutions are already integrated with cloud resources.

The ease of ingesting data from different sources across your infrastructure eliminates the need to manually import and correlate the same. This unification results in faster incident identification and more comprehensive analysis.

Earlier, SIEM solutions depended on On-Premise deployment to get a unified view of their systems. However, this meant hardware upgrades and data parsing. Further, scaling issues meant the continuous need for fine-tuning to reach peak performance.

Reduce Alert Fatigue

Managing DevOps alerts is the most time-consuming part of IT security. Especially when teams need to sift through thousands of alerts. This can result in alert fatigue, wherein teams cannot respond to alerts efficiently.

On-Premise SIEM solutions report a higher percentage of alert fatigue incidences than cloud solutions. This fatigue also gets reflected in better response time and fewer missed threats by the cloud-based SIEM.

Cloud solutions are easier to automate, thus reducing the volume of alerts and other repetitive tasks that teams handle manually. It allows them to focus on more critical incidents such as threat hunting, systematic revision in your security standing, and attack simulations.

Improved User Experience

Cloud-based solutions provide an easier and more efficient way for users to interact with their SEIM. Cloud SEIM interfaces can be accessed through web-based portals, which allows multiple users to gain access to data simultaneously.

Moreover, due to the scalability of cloud solutions, security analysts have no limitations on the number of reports they generate or the size of data queries they can perform.

Historical data can be easily stored and accessed via the cloud too. This eliminates the need for cold storage restores of time-sensitive data.

Further, cloud SIEM solutions operate on service-level agreements that guarantee uptime. This minimizes business disruptions or downtime due to unplanned outages.

Cloud solutions offer wider availability, which ensures that work is never interrupted compared to on-premise.

Less Expertise Needed

SIEM solutions, by nature, are complex and technical and require a dedicated expert to configure and maintain.

Cloud-based SIEM solutions simplify implementing and maintaining the tools and software. This lowers the level of expertise and the number of resources required to manage the system.

Improved Detection Capabilities

While processing-intensive technologies like behavior analytics, the cloud can significantly improve the detection abilities of your system.

On-Premise SIEMs that aren’t well-scaled struggle to benefit from the latest detection services. They often need to add more hardware to meet performance needs, thus raising costs.

Summary

SIEM investment is already delivering value across several business priorities. A cloud-native SIEM makes sense for many enterprises looking for a robust SIEM solution with the flexibility of adapting to evolving threats and organizational structures.

Cloud delivers much more than just scalability. It offers extended capability, which would not be possible to gain with On-Premise SIEM.