This is why many organizations these days are implementing SIEM tools to secure their systems, applications, and infrastructure in the cloud or on-premises. But why SIEM? The thing is, network security has grown, and organizations use plenty of services such as firewalls, cloud services, web app servers, etc. With more endpoints and systems in use, the attack surface increases. And monitoring each device, service, and system layer effectively becomes difficult. This is where SIEM tools come into the picture to provide context-based log events and automated threat remediation. This article will discuss what SIEM is, its importance, and how it can help secure your organization before looking at the best SIEM tools.
What is SIEM?
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a cybersecurity term where software services and products combine two systems – Security Information Management (SIM) & Security Event Management (SEM). SIEM = SIM + SEM SIEM tools leverage the concept of SIEM to provide real-time security analysis using alerts that network hardware and applications generate. They collect security events and logs data from multiple sources, including security applications and software, network devices, and endpoints like PCs and servers. In this way, the tools can offer a 360-degree view of all those systems, making it easier to spot security incidents and remediate them immediately. SIEM tools facilitate incident response, threat monitoring, event correlation, collecting and building reports, and analyzing data. They also alert you upon detecting a security threat immediately so you can take action before it can cause any harm.
Why is SIEM important?
As cybersecurity concerns rise, organizations need a solid security infrastructure to protect their customer and business data while safeguarding their business reputation and possible compliance issues. SIEM offers such a technology to track an attacker’s virtual footprints to get insights into previous events and associated attacks. It helps identify the origin of an attack and find a suitable remedy when there’s still time. There are many benefits of a SIEM tool, such as:
SIEM tools use past and present data to determine attack vectors They can identify the cause of attacks Detect activities and examine threats based on previous behaviors Increase your system or app incident protection to avoid damage to virtual properties and network structures Help you comply with regulatory bodies like HIPAA, PCI, etc. Help protect your business reputation and sustain customer trust and avoid penalties.
Finally, let’s look at some of the best SIEM tools out there.
Fusion SIEM
Fusion SIEM by Exabeam offers a unique combination of SIEM and Extended Detection & Response (XDR) into a modern solution for SecOps. It is a cloud solution that allows you to leverage world-class threat investigation, detection, and response. Using leading behavior analytics has made its threat detection advanced. You can also get productive outcomes with threat-centric and prescriptive use case plans. As a result, your work efficiency increases, and response times reduce using automation. Fusion SIEM offers cloud-based log storage, detailed compliance reporting, and guided and rapid search so you can meet audit requirements and regulatory compliance, including GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, NERC, NYDFS, or NIST with ease. With a report builder to generate comprehensive reports, Fusion SIEM helps you reduce operational overhead and save time on correlating data and creating it manually. The rapid and guided search boosts productivity while ensuring all analysts can access data whenever they want, regardless of their levels. You can search, collect, and enhance data from anywhere, from the cloud to endpoints. It eliminates blind spots and gives a full-pictured environment analysis. To help you create an effective SOC and tackle cybersecurity, Fusion SIEM lets you leverage prescriptive and threat-centered TDIR packages, offering pre-packaged content and repeatable workflows across the TDIR lifecycle. The tool offers security from different threat types and uses cases. In addition, they include content essential to operate a specific use case such as data sources, detection models and rules, automated playbooks, response checklists and investigation, and parsers.
Graylog
Graylog is one of the fastest centralized log gathering and analysis tools for your application stack, IT operations, and security operations. Designed to overcome legacy Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) challenges, Graylog’s scalable, flexible cybersecurity platform makes security analysts’ jobs easier and faster. With SIEM, Anomaly Detection, and User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) capabilities, Graylog provides security teams with even greater confidence, productivity, and expertise to mitigate risks caused by insider threats, credential-based attacks, and other cyber threats. Discover data endlessly and explore beyond the drill-downs by utilizing the power of integrated search, dashboards, reports, and workflow. It helps you reveal and expand more data moving forward and going deeper into information for finding accurate answers. Correlate data visualization across different sources and organize it into a unified screen to make everything easier. See threat availability and get alerted immediately to learn the threat’s origin, its path, its impacts, and how you can fix it. Furthermore, view vulnerabilities by visualizing trends and metrics in a location using dashboards. Also, use quick values, charts, and field statistics from search results and find threats from firewall logs, endpoint OSes, applications, DNS requests, and network equipment to make your security posture sturdy. Trace incident path to find which files, data, and systems are accessed and correlate data with HR systems, threat intelligence, Active Directory, physical security solutions, geolocation, etc. Use their GUI-based, intuitive report builder to fetch any data you need and stay compliant with security policies utilizing periodic reviews.
IBM QRadar
Perform smart security analytics to get actionable insights into critical threats with the help of IBM QRadar SIEM. It helps your security teams to detect threats accurately and prioritize them across your enterprise. Reduce incident impact by responding to threats quickly due to insights into logs, events, and data flow. You can also consolidate network flow data and log events from numerous devices, apps, and endpoints across your network. QRadar can correlate different data and aggregate related events into a single alert for quick incident analysis and prevention. It can also generate alerts on priority along with attack progress in the kill chain. This solution is available on the cloud (IaaS and SaaS environments) and on-premises. View all the events concerning a specific threat in a unified place and eliminate the hassle of manual tracking. QRadaralso enables analysts to concentrate on threat investigation and response. It is also equipped with out-of-the-box analytics that can automatically analyze network flows and logs for threat detection. QRadar ensures you comply with external regulations and internal policies by offering templates and pre-built reports that you can customize and generate within minutes. It supports STIX/TAXII and offers highly scalable, self-managing, and self-tuning databases with a flexible architecture effortless to deploy. Moreover, QRadar integrates seamlessly with 450 solutions.
LogRhythm
Create your organizational security with a solid foundation using NextGen SIEM Platform by LogRhythm. Tell your story around the host and user data cohesively to get proper insights easily on security and prevent incidents faster. Discover the true SOC power using this solution optimized for speed so you can identify threats quicker, collaborate on investigation tasks, automate processes, and prevent threats immediately. Plus, gain wider visibility on the entire environment, from the cloud to endpoints, to remove blind spots. This tool lets you spend time on impactful work rather than maintaining, feeding, and caring for your SIEM solution. It also helps you automate labor-intensive, repetitive work to enable your team to focus on important areas. LogRhythm offers high performance with reduced operating costs to meet the rapidly increasing environment’s scale and complexity. The NextGen SIEM Platform is built with LogRhythm XDR Stack that comes with comprehensive suite capabilities. It has a modular design to allow additional components with more security and sophistication. Also, it offers superior threat monitoring, hunting, investigation, and quick incident response at a low ownership cost. This easy-to-use tool offers precise and immediate results with structured and unstructured search, continuous correlation with AI engine, data enrichment and normalization, customizable dashboard, and visualizations. To learn more, watch a real-life inspired demo video where a security analyst utilizes the NextGen SIEM Platform and detects a deadly cyberattack over a water treatment plant.
SolarWinds
Improve security and demonstrate compliance using a ready-to-use, affordable, and lightweight security management solution – Security Event Manager by SolarWinds. It offers excellent monitoring by working 24/7 to find suspicious activities and respond to them in real time. It comes with an intuitive user interface, out-of-the-box content, and virtual deployment to help you get valuable insights from your logs in minimal time and expertise. You can also reduce the time for preparing and demonstrating compliance using audit-proven tools and reports for regulatory bodies like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOX. They have made their licensing depending on how many log-emitting sources are there instead of log volumes. Therefore, you don’t need to meddle with log selection to minimize the cost. Security Event Manager includes pre-built connectors in hundreds to collect logs from different sources and parse the data. Next, you can easily put them into a readable format and create a common room for your team to investigate threats, store logs, and get ready for audits with ease. It offers useful features like impressive filters, visualizations, and responsive and simple text-based searching for historical and live events. You can also save, schedule, and load common searches using the scheduled search feature. Its pricing starts from $2,613 with options like perpetual licensing and subscriptions.
Splunk
The analytics-driven, cloud-based SIEM tool – Splunk lets you detect, investigate, monitor, and respond to cyberthreats. It lets you inject data from on-premise and multi-cloud deployments to gain full visibility on your environments for quick threat detection. Correlate activities from different environments in its clear, unified view to discover unknown threats and abnormalities that you may not get in traditional tools. The cloud SIEM also offers immediate results to direct your focus on priority tasks without wasting time on managing complicated hardware. Manage security with alerts, risk scores, visualizations, and customizable dashboards. In addition, its alerts are risk-based, and you can attribute them to systems and users, map them to cybersecurity frameworks, trigger alerts on exceeded thresholds, etc., from the interface. As a result, you can experience increased true positives and short alert queues. Splunk uses machine learning to detect advanced threats and automates tasks for quicker resolution. You can also monitor the availability and uptime of cloud services such as AWS, GCP, and Azure for compliance and security. It can integrate with 1000+ solutions available FREE on Splunkbase.
Elastic Security
Get a unified protection system – Elastic Security – build on top of Elastic Stack. This open-source and FREE tool allows analysts to detect, mitigate, and respond immediately to threats. In addition to delivering SIEM, it also offers endpoint security, cloud monitoring, threat hunting, and more. Elastic Security automates threat detection while minimizing MTTD using its powerful SIEM detection engine. Learn how to find security threats within your environment, cost savings, and benefit from increased ROI. Search, analyze, and visualize data easily from the cloud, endpoints, users, network, etc., in a few seconds. You can also search years of data and collect host data using osquery. The tool comes with flexible licensing to leverage data across the entire ecosystem regardless of its volume, age, or variety. Avoid damage in your environment by using environment-wide ransomware and malware prevention. Implement analytics quickly and leverage the global community for security across MITRE ATT & CK. You can also detect complex online threats using their cross-index correlation, techniques, and ML jobs. Elastic Security enables you to find the timeline, extent, and origin of an attack and encounter them with built-in case management, intuitive UI, and 3rd-party automation. Plus, create workflow visualizations and KPIs with Kibana Lens. You can also review security information and view non-traditional sources like business analytics, APM, etc., to gain better insights while simplifying reporting. Build dashboards using drag-and-drop fields and intelligent suggestions for visualization. In addition, Elastic Security involves no rigid licensing system; pay for the resources you use no matter what your data volume, endpoint count, or use case is. They also offer a 14-day FREE trial without asking for your credit card.
InsightsIDR
Rapid7 offers InsightsIDR, a security solution to detect incidents, respond to them, endpoint visibility, and authentication monitoring. It can identify unauthorized access from internal and external threats and shows suspicious activities to simplify the process from a larger number of data streams. Their adaptable, agile, and tailored SIEM is created in the cloud to offer quick deployment and scalability as your organization grows. You can also discover threats immediately and solve the issues using advanced analysis, unique detections, and machine learning, all in a single interface. Leverage their intelligent network, SOC experts, and research to find the best solution for your business needs. Additionally, Rapid7 offers behavior analysis for users and attackers, including endpoint visibility and detection, traffic analysis, a visual timeline for threat investigation, deception technology, centralized log management, automation, and file integrity monitoring (FIM). InsightIDR offers an expert-driven and unified approach to SIEM. It will deliver results in days instead of months to help you drive efficiencies by highlighting important areas.
Sumo Logic
Cloud SIEM Enterprise by Sumo Logic provides deep security analysis with improved visibility to monitor your on-premises, multi-cloud, or hybrid infrastructures seamlessly to understand the context and impact of a cyberattack. The tool is helpful for a wide range of use cases, such as compliance. It combines automation and analytics to perform accurate security analysis and triage alerts automatically. As a result, your efficiency increases, and analysts can also concentrate on high-value security functions. Cloud SIEM Enterprise provides organizations with a modern SaaS-based SIEM to protect their cloud systems, bring innovations to the SOC, and meet the rapidly changing cyberattack surface. Moreover, it is deployed through Sumo Logic’s cloud-native, secure, and multi-tenant platform. You get elastic scalability to support all your data sources to aggregate and analyze them, offering scalability even during peak periods. It offers higher freedom and flexibility, so you can bring your data no matter where it lies without vendor lock-in fear. The tool can automate core analysis tasks and enrich the insights with more data extracted from user information, network traffic, and 3rd-party threat feeds. Plus, it offers a clear context to help investigate incidents quickly and address them faster. It can also parse, create, and map a normalized record with more access to analysts for investigation and full-text searches. Cloud SIEM Enterprise represents insights in an intelligent, prioritized, and correlated way to increase validation dramatically and enable you to make quick response decisions. It can integrate well with multiple solutions like Okta, Office 365, AWS GuardDuty, Carbon Black, and more using API keys.
NetWitness
The world-class SIEM tool of NetWitness delivers high-performing log management, analytics, and retention in a simple cloud form. It eliminates traditional administration and deployment requirements using a straightforward licensing model. As a result, you can acquire high-quality SIEM easily and quickly without sacrificing power or capability. Get started faster with minimal setup and leverage the latest application software and systems. The tool supports 100s of event sources with fast reporting, a search facility, and robust threat detection. It saves you from investing money in administrative activities instead of security and compliance to protect your organization more. NetWitness Logs enriches, indexes, and parses logs during the capture time to create session-wise metadata and accelerate analysis and alerting dramatically. Get compliant user cases and pre-built reports, adhering to HIPAA, PCI, SOX, SSAE, NISPOM, NERC CIP, ISO 27002, GPG13, FISMA, FFIEC, FERPA, Bill 198, and Basel II. NetWitness Cloud SIEM can ingest logs from 350+ sources, along with log monitoring for Azure, AWS, and SaaS apps like Salesforce and Office 365.
AlienVault OSSIM
One of the most widely used open-source SIEM tools – AlienVault OSSIM, is excellent for users to install the tool by themselves. This event management and security information software provide a feature-rich SIEM with correlation, normalization, and event collection. AlienVault OSSIM can address many difficulties that security professionals encounter, such as intrusion detection, vulnerability assessment, asset discovery, vent correlation, and behavioral monitoring. It utilizes AlienVault Open Threat Exchange and allows you to receive real-time data on malicious hosts. You get continuous threat intel and unified security controls. In addition, you can deploy this single platform for threat discovery, response, and managing compliance on-premises and in the cloud. It also offers log management for forensics investigations and continuous compliance. With real-time and prioritized alarms, you get minimum false positives. They also give you regular updates to stay updated with new threats and pre-built reports for HIPAA, NIST CSF, PCI DSS, and more.
Conclusion
I hope this list of the best SIEM tools helps you choose the right solution for your business based on your needs and budget to implement solid security for your infrastructure.
