Which SIEM Solution Is Your Business’s Best Option?

The right SIEM platform can save you time, money, and keep you protected.

In today’s world, many businesses are finding themselves sandwiched between ever-evolving threats and compliance regulations. And while strict adherence to compliance protocols is a basic tenet of cybersecurity, keeping up with the latest regulations while also monitoring for known threats can be a challenge in and of itself. More challenging still is monitoring for unknown threats like zero-days. That’s why choosing the right SIEM platform is so important.

SIEM can help your organization meet regulatory compliance requirements and improve threat detection at the same time. Here’s how.

What is SIEM and what are the benefits?

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a staple of any good cybersecurity infrastructure. But they also come with the added benefit of helping businesses streamline regulatory compliance.

By consolidating information from different hosts, and sources across your environment, SIEM solutions provide a holistic picture of what is going on across your organization. This is done by carrying out a range of functions such as searching for insecure protocols or unauthorized network connections as well as monitoring log-ins and log-offs. This data is then used to create detailed event logs and alerts, allowing a unified reporting to better identify security gaps and compliance violations.
In addition to optimizing compliance, the right SIEM platform can provide you with a comprehensive overview of malicious threats. The data included in event logs, alerts and automated reports are analyzed in near real-time to give you a big-picture assessment of the overall state of your cybersecurity as well as actionable alerts to block suspicious traffic.

The hidden costs and drawbacks of SIEM. 

While there are a wide variety of SIEM solutions—ranging from those hosted in the Cloud to those hosted on-premises and even hybrid systems— most can be divided into two major categories: stand-alone solutions and managed.

Stand-alone SIEM solutions are typically self-managed, out-of-the-box products that provide your organization with a centralized way to track compliance and monitor threats. Due to the self-managed nature of stand-alone solutions, upfront they can seem like the more cost-effective solution. At least, it appears that way. Many SIEMs are priced unpredictably due to their consumption-based model. And there are also hidden costs when it comes to maintaining a stand-alone SIEM.

Firstly, there’s the cost of implementation and ongoing maintenance. Then there’s the labor cost. Even for the average SMB, the amount of data that is logged and analyzed daily can be staggering. Your IT department will have to pull double duty in balancing daily responsibilities with 24/7 threat monitoring which can ultimately make it harder to obtain and retain top IT talent, an issue that has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Couple this with having to pay personnel across the three shifts you’ll need for 24/7 monitoring, and the economical advantages of stand-alone SIEM start to fade.

However, the real cost of stand-alone SIEM is compromised security. Due to the increased responsibility, you’ll have to worry about alert fatigue which can cause your team to get bogged down, miss, or even ignore certain tickets. comprising the overall security of your environment. Furthermore, while a stand-alone solution is capable of detecting threats in real-time by analyzing event logs, there is typically no built-in way to respond to them. This is especially true for unknown threats. Managed solutions and the cost of SaaS

Managed solutions and the cost of SaaS

Whereas a stand-alone SIEM is managed by an organization’s in-house team, managed solutions— sometimes called SIEM-as-a-Service (SaaS)—are outsourced to a Security Operations Center (SOC) which provides 24/7 threat monitoring. This has a few advantages over the stand-alone model.

First, it reduces the overall workload for your internal team. But more importantly, SIEM technology requires continual upkeep and refinement to stay aligned with your unique environment and keep ahead of ever-evolving threats. This is something a SIEM SOC is uniquely positioned to provide, tuning the technology that powers your SIEM platform to ensure that your network is continually protected. Oftentimes the reason bad actors are successful is due to a misconfiguration in technology or a missed indicator of compromise cybersecurity alert.
However, because of this, managed solutions are much more expensive than their stand-alone counterparts. And for smaller businesses with tighter IT budgets, they can be prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, while employing the services of a SOC increases your organizations’ capacity to respond to threats, because that response relies on analyzing event logs, it is reactive as opposed to proactive.

And with ransomware attacks, phishing schemes, and other threats becoming more advanced, reactive security simply won’t cut it.

CloudJacketXDR is the next step in SIEM technology.

To address this fundamental issue in SIEM technology, we created CloudJacketXDR, our Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform. CloudJacketXDR, provides real-time threat analysis one expects from a SIEM but takes it a step further by incorporating managed detection and response (MDR). This means that threats and vulnerabilities are identified proactively by a 24/7 Security Operations Center before your environment and information have been compromised. Our Security Analyst vets the alerts allowing your team the peace of mind around the clock. On average the SOC will manage 99% of alerts without any client intervention.

Equally as important, CloudJacketXDR can be customized to your company’s unique business needs as well as your budget, with no charge for hardware or software. This keeps your upfront cost low. Because you shouldn’t have to sacrifice security to protect your bottom line.

By combining real-time threat detection and response with detailed analysis and event logging, CloudJacketXDR is a SIEM solution that addresses the needs of today’s evolving cybersecurity landscape.