Azure SIEM 101 – A beginner’s guide to smarter threat protection
In the current digital landscape, protecting data from rapidly evolving cyber threats is crucial for organizations. As a result, Microsoft Azure has launched search information and event management (SIEM) tools for smarter and faster threat protection. Keep reading to learn how SIEM solutions can safeguard your data.
What Is SIEM?
- As more organizations switch toward cloud-based data storage, security systems have evolved to collect, monitor, and analyze off-site data. This has led to the development of on-premises, cloud-based, and cloud-native SIEM solutions. Search information and event management (SIEM) is a comprehensive security system that aggregates, searches, analyzes, and reports massive organizational data gathered from various sources within the digital infrastructure.
In addition, SIEM solutions allow organizations to actively monitor their IT environment to detect and mitigate potential threats across their entire network. In other words, SIEM is a data-centric security solution that assists organizations in recognizing potential threats and vulnerabilities before they can cause disruptions in critical business operations.
Components Of SIEM
- SIEM systems leverage two critical cybersecurity components to detect and respond to potential cyber threats proactively.
Security Event Management (SEM)
- The SEM provides real-time threat monitoring by logging and storing event data from different sources in a centralized place. This data is then analyzed to identify irregularities. The system generates an alert when a threat is detected, allowing IT professionals to evaluate the security risk and respond accordingly.
Security Information Management (SIM)
- It collects, analyzes, and reports on log data generated within the IT infrastructure. SIEM providers and the organization’s IT team set specific security parameters. If analytics match this ruleset, the system generates a security alert.
Best Practices For Implementing SIEM Solutions
Whether you’re planning to invest in a new SIEM solution or have already made the investment, follow these essential steps to ensure a successful deployment of your SIEM solution:
- Understand the scope of your implementation, define how your business can best benefit from SIEM, and set up the appropriate security use cases.
- Implement your predefined data correlation rules across all systems and networks.
- Identify the compliance requirements of your business and configure your SIEM solution to audit and report on these standards in real time to better understand your risk posture.
- Classify all digital assets in your organization’s IT infrastructure, essential to managing log data collection, detecting access abuses, and monitoring network activity.
- Develop and implement BYOD policies and restrictions that can be accessed when integrating SIEM solutions.
- Regularly update your SIEM configurations to reduce false positives in the system security alerts.
- Practices all threat response plans to ensure teams remain vigilant and respond quickly to security incidents.
- Use artificial intelligence and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) capabilities to automate wherever possible.
- Consider partnering with a managed security service provider (MSSP) to manage your SIEM solution. Depending on your business-specific requirements, an MSSP is equipped to handle the complexities of SIEM implementation and provide ongoing management for optimal functionality.
In an interconnected digital world, implementing a SIEM solution is essential to ensure the security and integrity of your organization’s digital infrastructure. In addition, a comprehensive SIEM implementation strategy can significantly reduce the risk of cyberattacks and protect sensitive data, allowing you to focus on key business operations.
A report suggests that 88% of security analysts encounter threat visibility gaps and other challenges with their current security management solutions. However, azure SIEM is an invaluable tool that safeguards IT systems and businesses of all sizes without the fallbacks of the traditional approach. Discover how Microsoft Azure SIEM solution can help you scale your business.
Benefits Of SIEM For Your Business
- Azure SIEM is a powerful and proactive solution that offers various benefits to meet and satisfy your business’s security needs. Here are some of the benefits:
Aggregation Of Security Data
- One of the noteworthy advantages of SIEM is data aggregation. It gathers and centralizes security information from various sources on a network. Azure SIEM is a modern and dependable solution that simplifies data aggregation for enterprises, enabling organizations to effortlessly collect security data from devices, users, applications, and servers in hybrid environments.
In addition, it leverages the power of artificial intelligence to identify real security threats promptly. This frees businesses from the burden of managing traditional SIEM infrastructure. Since it is built on Azure, it offers unparalleled cloud scale and speed to address business security needs seamlessly.
Automates Threat Identification And Response
- Microsoft Azure Sentinel is known for its powerful threat detection and response automation capabilities. It leverages its playbook feature and integration with Azure Logic Apps to offer powerful automation capabilities for threat detection and response. Thus, making incident management more efficient and effective. When an alert is triggered, it generates an incident, which can then be linked to an automation process. This helps manage incident status and assign it to the appropriate team member for investigation.
In addition, the investigation functionality enables you to investigate multilayered attacks by mapping elements across incidents. This feature helps identify an incident’s root cause and understand the attack’s scope. This way, appropriate measures can be taken to prevent similar attacks from occurring in the future.
Helps Maintain Compliance
- Security information and event management (SIEM) solutions help enterprises maintain compliance by identifying vulnerabilities and regulating third-party access. It integrates with various popular solutions, including Palo Alto Networks, F5, Symantec, Fortinet, Check Point, etc., to provide enterprises with a comprehensive view of their security posture, making it easier to identify and address potential compliance failures. These integration capabilities of Azure SIEM enable enterprises to monitor and manage their compliance requirements more efficiently.
Data Normalization
- In addition to collecting data, SIEM solutions also normalize it. Data normalization converts collected data into a format that enables log management and correlation consistency. Data normalization is done using Azure Monitor, based on a highly reliable and scalable log analytics database that can handle over 10 petabytes of data daily. This provides an exceptionally fast and efficient query engine capable of sorting through millions of records in seconds.
With its advanced analytics, unparalleled threat intelligence, and built-in automation capabilities, Azure SIEM enables organizations to detect and respond to potential security incidents quickly and effectively. Moreover, it offers comprehensive visibility into your entire IT environment, whether on-premises or in multiple clouds, and enables you to collect, detect, investigate, and respond to threats at scale. Therefore, it is a valuable tool for organizations to enhance security capabilities and protect their business from potential security risks.
Improve your Azure security monitoring by deploying Azure’s Native SIEM tool. Henson Group offers intelligent advanced security and threat detection response along with an array of Intelligent managed services to help improve the reliability and performance of your cloud infrastructure. Keep abreast of the latest trends and insights in the cloud industry by subscribing to our blog and newsletter. Join now, and let our seasoned experts help you optimize your business operations!