SIEM, SOC, and What it Means For YOU!

There are a lot of products and brands out there that like to talk about cybersecurity. SIEM. SOC. Antivirus. “Network Monitoring.”

Some of these solutions are effective. Some are not. But here’s one thing they all have in common: implemented alone, without the appropriate knowledge and context of your organization’s security needs… they will ultimately not be enough to keep your data secure.

Siloed solutions will never be as effective as a fully comprehensive security solution.

So how does one get the context necessary for protecting your data, as well as the data of employees and customers?

It’s a great question, which is why we wanted to examine the relationship between SIEM, SOC, and you!

What Is Security Context?

You need context to understand the big picture of your security environment. And that means you need a central source of truth that you can rely on.

The security products we mentioned earlier can be used as siloed solutions to a particular problem. For example, you can implement log monitoring to keep an eye on the activity that happens on your network.

But if you don’t understand the context for normal activity on your network, and you don’t know what deviations to look for, you won’t be able to pinpoint malevolent activity, stop it before it makes a significant impact on your system, or prevent it from happening in the future.

That’s where SIEM comes in.

What Does SIEM Do?

SIEM stands for “Security Information & Event Management.”

In today’s IT landscape, it’s important to have the logs for all your point solutions to integrate into one area. That area is your SIEM software.

Put simply, SIEM software collects data from the different technologies within your system, monitors and analyzes that data for deviations and possible security risks, and then takes the appropriate action against those threats.

The main value of SIEM software: it takes an enormous amount of complex data and provides a single pane of glass to observe potential security events or incidents through.

Having a centralized log analysis allows an organization to have a single source of truth for data from across all their integrated systems. It can filter through thousands of actions and activities and determine whether they are correlated.

In other words, a mature SIEM doesn’t just identify whether a security breach happened: it can also pinpoint how it happened, and whether it’s associated with any other potential breaches.

But here’s the thing with SIEM software… it’s only as good as the people who are running it. Which brings us to the people side of your security solution: the SOC.

What Is A SOC Good For?

The top cybersecurity companies will use a SOC (Security Operations Center) to truly monitor and proactively protect an organization’s data systems.

In a SOC, experts are watching your data move through your system. Looking at access and authentications. At user behavior. Watching for any anomalous activity or potential threats that could hit your system and compromise your data, your employee’s data, or the data of your customers.

A SOC is where human eyes are on your system 24/7. The best SOC experts will get to know you and learn how your organization uses data to determine your company’s unique data fingerprint.

Where Do YOU Fit In?

It may be tempting to just consider installing a SIEM software system on-site. And then hiring the personnel to manage it and monitor the activity.

But that comes at no small cost. First off, you have to buy the SIEM tools that you plan to use. Then, we need to consider the infrastructure to effectively run a SIEM on-prem. We’re talking storage. And servers. All the bells and whistles.

And as far as a SOC is concerned… well. Onboarding, training, and managing a cybersecurity team is not a small investment. For qualified people, it can come with a very steep price tag. Not to mention, it can take 6-9 months to see accurate results from an on-prem team you train yourself.

But with many managed SIEM services, it’s difficult to know what you’re getting. There are limiting parameters to consider, like how many alerts do I get, or how many integrations will they manage? There are different tiers of service that are hard to distinguish, and hourly rates billed for time fixing problems that should be covered in your service contract.

Perhaps most importantly of all, it raises the question: without an in-house security solution, how can you be sure that your security team will understand your organization’s security context?

Find a Security Partner

The answer? Find a managed SIEM service that treats you like a partner.

As a business owner, you understand the cost of doing business. You don’t want to hire unnecessary people, especially when you can outsource the work to a qualified professional and get top-tier results for a fraction of the cost.

At BitLyft Cybersecurity, we partner with all of our clients to make sure their security needs are met; not only for today but for the many days to come. You aren’t buying a product, you’re buying a long-term solution from a team of security experts.

We proactively seek out threats to remediate and ways to keep your system secure and compliant, so your IT department can focus on keeping your business systems running smoothly.

Sign up for a free demo, and let us show you what we can do. We’d love to chat about partnering with you and keeping your business systems secure.