Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is the brain behind a company’s cybersecurity posture. In recent years, SIEM has made an evolutionary leap to combat the variety of threats a company faces. Next gen SIEM is here and has become an essential part of every company’s cybersecurity posture.

Given the overlaps between next gen SIEM and traditional solutions, most companies have misinterpreted how the former works. Instead of focusing on buzzwords like AI and ML, companies must dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of next gen SIEM to understand its benefits.

Here are three reasons why a next gen SIEM is necessary for modern organizations.

Robust Data Architecture

Legacy SIEM solutions needed an army of data analysts to keep pace with log file outputs. These workflows involved analysts poring over log incidents and manually assessing each incident’s threat level. If logs overflowed, teams could miss important events with obscure log entries.

Next gen SIEM removes this headache by automatically sourcing security event data and scanning it for abnormal events. While its ability to scan data is impressive (and where AI enters the picture,) SIEM solutions’ ability to source data is the nuts and bolts of the platform.

Modern SIEM solutions seamlessly connect the infrastructure sprawl modern organizations experience, bringing all security data to a central database. This ability is underpinned by robust architecture that makes it easy to automatically query and retrieve results.

Solutions such as Hadoop, BigQuery, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch feature prominently, giving security teams breathing room when monitoring security logs. In contrast, legacy SIEM solutions are ill-equipped for the modern big data-centric cybersecurity environment.

Powerful User Analysis And Monitoring

Next gen SIEMs simplify network monitoring and analysis by automating several tasks in those workflows. For instance, a modern SIEM platform enriches user activity with context that offers security teams more insights into threat levels. Legacy SIEMs, in contrast, offered a dump of data that needed further analysis.

The results were a time sink and slow response times to potential threats. Next gen SIEM solutions offer user activity enrichment by presenting threat intelligence integrations and correlating user activities to that data. These platforms also dynamically group users, to offer security teams a cohort-based view of activity, reducing threat evaluation times.

In addition, NG SIEMs offer IP address data, user device information, access timelines, asset ownership, and service account identification. Modern SIEMs are also smart enough to associate user and machine types with certain activities, giving security teams a baseline of activity they can run comparisons against.

Legacy SIEMs were not robust enough to offer such enriched context. For instance, if a malicious insider maintained normal activity on their work email account but transferred files using their personal email, SIEM platforms would not associate these activities with the same user.

Security teams would have to manually make the link, leading to poor response times. Next gen SIEMs do this automatically, reducing the chance of insider threats crippling operations. Linking asset ownership to user login locations and peer groups is now easy, giving security teams a huge degree of context when analyzing network activity.

Benchmarking and analysis of this kind are powered by AI and ML algorithms that reduce the burden of security on teams, giving companies a much more robust security apparatus.

Robust Security Information Models

Legacy SIEMs offered a wealth of data on user activity but left it up to analysts to decipher the meanings behind these incidents. In addition to lacking context, these systems could not link disparate security events into a coherent timeline. Manually linking hundreds of thousands of security events, connecting them to a user, and analyzing data behind these events is expensive.

Next gen SIEMs simplify these workflows by offering context, as explained in the previous section. However, they go a step further by automatically monitoring for lateral movement by analyzing security log data sources. Instead of security analysts querying multiple sources and linking movement information, next gen SIEMs present everything on a single screen, helping teams respond to threats quickly.

These workflows also prevent the number of false positives a team has to deal with. Usually, automated workflows produce plenty of these but the additional context next gen SIEMs offer simplified analysis, leading to quick conclusions. More importantly, security teams can prioritize events based on asset risk, something legacy SIEMS could never offer.

Context has an additional benefit. Instead of generating hundreds of thousands, if not millions of security log entries for further analysis, next gen SIEMs reduce the noise security teams have to manage. The result is alert prioritization and faster incident response.

Essential To Modern Cybersecurity

Next gen SIEMs might sound like another abbreviation in a field full of them. However, they are the brains behind modern SOC and companies cannot do without them. By using advanced technology, NG SIEMs are revolutionizing cybersecurity and will soon become indispensable.