What is Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)?
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is an IT security software or tool offering a holistic view of an organization’s information security. SIEM solutions provide a complete view of what is happening on a network in real-time and help IT teams to be more proactive in the fight against security threats. It gathers log security data from diverse sources, categorizing and analyzing security alerts in near real-time. SIEM IT security tool helps to detect, prevent, and resolve all cyberattacks while centralizing all the security events from every device within a network. SIEM gathers security data from network devices, servers, domain controllers, and others. Security Information and Event Management stores, normalizes, aggregates, and applies analytics to that data to discover trends, detect threats, and enable companies to inspect any alerts.
SIEM basically functions by combining two technologies:
- Security information management (SIM), which collects data from log files for analysis and reports on security threats and events
- Security event management (SEM), which performs real-time system monitoring, notifies network security admins about vital problems and establishes correlations between security events.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) process comprises of the following:
- Data collection: Entire source of network security information, e.g., servers, OS, firewalls, antivirus software, and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) are configured to feed event data into a SIEM tool
- Policies: A profile created by the SIEM administrator defines the behavior of enterprise systems, both under normal conditions and during pre-defined security incidents
- Data consolidation and correlation: SIEM solutions consolidate, parse, and analyze log files.
- Notifications: If an event or set of events triggers a SIEM rule, the system alerts the security personnel.
