Next Gen SIEM: Definition and Best Practices

In this post, we’ll define next gen SIEM and its features, and we'll demonstrate how it differs from traditional SIEM. We’ll also discuss the challenges you can expect when implementing.

Security information and event management (SIEM) technology is struggling to manage threats across the current ecosystem. Traditional SIEM solutions are slow, limited in scalability, inefficient in the cloud, require prolonged deployment time, and have a high operational overhead. They’re no match for expanding attack surfaces, rapidly changing regulations, data explosions, and increasing budgetary pressures. The focus is therefore shifting to next-gen SIEM solutions that can ingest data faster and are more agile, affordable, scalable, and deployable.

In this post, we’ll define next-gen SIEM and its components and features, and we’ll demonstrate how it differs from traditional SIEM. We’ll also explore the challenges you can expect when implementing it. Most important, we’ll provide you with some best practices.

What Is Next-Gen SIEM?

Next-gen SIEM uses behavioral analytics and automation to detect and rapidly respond to unusual activity patterns, noncompliant system activities, security issues, and anomalies. It’s the heart of a modern security operations center (SOC), allowing teams to process the enormous amounts of data generated from the Internet of Things, the cloud, artificial intelligence, and analytics.

The capabilities of traditional SIEM are mainly statistical analysis, log management, alerting, and reporting. You’ll often need to complement it with security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technologies. Next-gen SIEM builds on the foundations of these capabilities and additionally ingests data regardless of the source and enhances it with advanced behavioral rules, workflow automation, and artificial intelligence.

Key Components of Next-Gen SIEM

Next-gen SIEM is made up of unique components that make it stand out over traditional SIEM.

1. Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning

Machine learning (ML) and analytics enable next-gen SIEM to use behavioral profiling to detect unusual behavior in real time. It uses ML models to assign a score to each event to determine whether it poses a threat or not. All scores that exceed predefined thresholds are forwarded to an analyst for further investigation.

2. Threat Intelligence Integration

Next-gen SIEMs come with integrated threat intelligence platforms as part of their core offering. They automatically query security data and run vulnerability scans and penetration tests to detect suspicious activity. Next-gen SIEM correlates internal events with third-party threat intelligence feeds to provide an even broader understanding of potential threats.

3. User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)

Next-gen SIEM applies UEBA to analyze the learned behaviors of users and identify attacks that don’t rely on known signatures or rules. UEBA uses deep learning, reinforcement learning, Bayesian networks, and supervised and unsupervised learning to learn human behavior patterns. For example, when a marketing employee starts downloading files on Saturday at 1:00 a.m. from a financial database they rarely interact with outside of work hours, the system will flag this as suspicious, potentially indicating insider threats or compromised credentials.

4. Automation and Orchestration

Next-gen SIEM uses playbooks to automate responses and executes a series of predefined mitigation and containment actions for each suspicious security event. Generally, next-gen SIEM can automate responses to detected threats by isolating affected systems, applying patches, and triggering alerts.

5. Scalability and Cloud Support

Next-gen SIEMs integrate with public and private cloud platforms. This provides visibility into cloud platform activities like logs from virtual machines, containers, SaaS applications, and cloud-native security tools. Next-gen SIEM has prebuilt connectors that enable you to access events and log data from SaaS applications and cloud infrastructure such as IBM Cloud and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Comparing Traditional SIEM With Next-Gen SIEM

Limitations of Traditional SIEM

• Traditional SIEM was designed for on-premises environments. Therefore, scalability is limited by the computing, storage, and memory resources the on-premises hardware can provide. When moved to the cloud, traditional SIEM runs up high cloud infrastructure costs and slow performance due to inefficient architectures.
• Traditional SIEM cannot handle the large volumes of hot data generated today due to the lack of computing power and storage capacity. Data is stored in cold storage, where it’s slow and tedious to retrieve, making it challenging to investigate threats that happened in the past.
• Traditional SIEM has a closed ecosystem that integrates well with other security platforms from the same vendor but not from different vendors.

Advantages of Next-Gen SIEM Over Traditional SIEM

• Next-gen SIEM is delivered through a SaaS model, leveraging the elasticity of the cloud to deliver unlimited computing power, storage, and memory resources.
• With resources available on-demand, you can collect large data volumes, store them longer, and allow more users to access them more frequently. This gives you visibility into more data sources, enabling a greater security posture. It ingests data from many sources and sends it through an open API.
• Next-gen SIEM correlates data from many sources, including security, network, servers, applications, and endpoints, whether hosted on a private cloud, on-premises, or in a public cloud.
• Next-gen SIEM’s architecture uses open APIs, allowing you to integrate with solutions from different vendors and experience minimal impact when you change your security portfolio.

Core Features of Next-Gen SIEM Solutions

1. Real-Time Threat Detection and Response

Next-gen SIEM uses behavioral analytics to detect familiar attack signatures, correlations, and patterns in real time. It aggregates data from sources such as IDS, antivirus, and authentication systems to allow you to quickly detect security threats and incidents that individual tools cannot identify alone. You can respond to threats as they occur, reducing response time.

2. Comprehensive Data Collection and Normalization

Next-gen SIEM allows you to collect data relating to event logs, network flow, and Syslog data from multiple sources and parse it through analytics systems. It correlates data and sends alerts if it detects non-compliant activities, policy breaches, or potential threats. Additionally, it leverages scalable NOSQL databases such as Apache Spark, Hadoop, and Elastic, allowing parallel processing and speeding up data ingestion and analysis. Thanks to its low-cost distributed storage, you can inexpensively store historical data.

3. Enhanced Incident Visibility and Investigation

Next-gen SIEMs provide continuous real-time visibility for security events. The attack path visualization feature helps you think like an attacker, understanding the routes an attacker could take to exploit vulnerabilities.

4. Flexible and Scalable Deployment Options

There are many deployment options you can choose for next-gen SIEM, depending on your business needs and existing infrastructure setup.

• Fully managed SIEM (MSSP): a third-party vendor that provides all security services.
• SaaS SIEM: explicitly built for the cloud and supports cloud-native infrastructures.
• Co-managed SIEM: some risk management tasks are outsourced to an SIEM service provider, while the existing IT security team handles the rest.
• Hybrid deployment: combines both on-premises and cloud deployment where part of the infrastructure is on-premises and part is in the cloud.

5. Compliance and Security Reporting

Next-gen SIEM solutions support AI-driven compliance reporting. They automatically verify regulatory compliance for GDPR, SOX, HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc.; generate audit reports; and manage data governance and privacy. They analyze historical and current data to help maintain compliance with rules and regulations. Additionally, they offer customizable compliance reporting workflows.

Challenges in Implementing Next-Gen SIEM

Despite their advanced capabilities, next-gen SIEM solutions don’t come without downsides.

1. Data overload and quality issues: An organization can record billions of events daily. Storing, aggregating, and analyzing this data in order to retrieve information for managing threats can overwhelm next-gen SIEM systems and reduce their effectiveness.
2. Skill gaps and resource constraints: The cybersecurity industry has a talent shortage. About four million cybersecurity specialists are needed worldwide. You’ll need to balance your next-gen SIEM talent needs with budget constraints.
3. Integration with existing security ecosystems: Integrating next-gen SIEM with diverse existing technologies and systems can be complex. Also, next-gen SIEM is built for modern architecture, and incompatibility may arise for organizations that use traditional infrastructure.

Best Practices for Adopting Next-Gen SIEM

#1. Assess Your Organizational Needs and Objectives

The first success factor for implementing next-gen SIEM is defining specific business security goals. Your interest might be in compliance monitoring, advanced threat detection, incidence response, etc. In this way, you can prioritize critical processes and tasks that support implementation.

#2. Choose the Right Vendor and Solution

Once you fully understand your security goals, it’s time to find a next-gen SIEM provider with the capacity and capability to address your needs. Make sure their product offering aligns with the company’s budget.

#3. Adequately Train Your Teams

Train next-gen SIEM administrators and security analysts to make sure they can respond to alerts. Document your implementation process, including configuration, maintenance, and operations concepts.

#4. Continuously Monitor and Improve

Continuously monitor next-gen SIEM’s performance and update it to the latest version to address emerging threats.

Next-Gen SIEM Case Studies and Success Stories

Golomt Bank, a Mongolian-based urban retail bank, used Securonix’s next-gen SIEM to improve its cybersecurity posture. The bank previously used a traditional rules-based SIEM that lacked the advanced behavioral analytics needed to detect complex cyber threats. It could also not provide real-time visibility of security events or use statistical correlation that next-gen SIEM platforms like Singularity AI SIEM employ to correlate events. Thus, the bank transitioned to Securonix, enabling its security team to monitor large volumes of data from various sources in real time. With a next-gen SIEM, they could also leverage UEBA capabilities to detect anomalies better and faster.

Another case study is that of Ulta Beauty, an American beauty retailer that leveraged Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM to support its large-scale cloud migration and secure its expansive e-commerce platform. As the retailer’s e-commerce revenue increased from $200 million to over $2 billion, its security challenges surged. By using a next-gen SIEM, the company improved incident response times, ensuring rapid identification and mitigation of security vulnerabilities. The retailer automated threat investigation and response, saving on labor costs. However, cost savings are not the only benefit of automation. Using automated workflows that next-gen SIEM like Singularity AI SIEM allows you to focus on the core business.

Wrapping Up

The modern SOC requires agile, lightweight tools with a modern architecture. Traditional SIEM cannot meet these demands. They cannot scale efficiently or provide the real-time insights needed for rapid incident response services. Next-gen SIEM solutions address these shortfalls with their AI-driven analytics and cloud-native architecture. They are highly scalable and provide real-time visibility, automated workflows, and incident response playbooks at low overheads, helping companies balance financial and security needs.

SentinelOne’s Singularity AI SIEM offers next-generation capabilities. It leverages AI to detect threats and respond to security incidents in real time. Request a demo to see how Singularity can empower your autonomous SOC.

FAQs

What is next-generation security?

Next-generation security comprises new-age cybersecurity solutions that use automated response playbooks, big data analytics, and machine learning.

Why do we need for next-generation SIEM?

Next-generation SIEM is needed to proactively solve today’s complex and evolving security threats that traditional SIEM cannot.