Best SIEM Tools in 2021

The widespread adoption of digital technology has shifted a significant volume of crimes from the physical world into cyberspace. Cyberattacks are increasing in sophistication and numbers. Worldwide cybercrime cost is projected to be $10.05 billion annually by 2025. The estimated losses of cybercrime have been reflected worldwide by increasing spending on security solutions significantly. According to International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Security Spending Guide, global spending on security-related hardware, software, and services will reach $174.7 billion in 2024.

To counter the increasing number of cyberattacks, organizations adopt various security solutions such as firewalls, IDS/IPS, DLP, and VPN. The increased number of security solutions deployed in most IT environments raises the need to have a solution to analyze the sheer volume of data generated from these tool logs. Analyzing thousands of security systems log data generated in one second is impossible manually; this is why SIEM solutions were developed to facilitate monitoring and collecting security systems log data in one central location.

SIEM stands for security information and event management; SIEM is a merge of two related solutions, SEM (security event management) and SIM (security information management).

SIM refers to the way a particular organization collects data. For instance, security data (e.g., logs, event data) are gathered from different network security devices (e.g., firewalls, IDS/IPS) and applications (e.g., antivirus and antimalware) and stored using a unified format. They are placed on a central platform (typically an on-premise or cloud server), so they can be analyzed quickly.

On the other hand, SEM provides real-time monitoring capability and notifies security administrators about any issues that may be a threat.

The combination of SIM and SEM forms the SIEM platform. A SIEM program provides real-time analysis of different security alerts generated by various applications and security appliances such as Firewalls and IDS/IPS. It then matches the generated alerts/events against a predefined set of rules defined by the security administrators. It can group these events and correlate them with threat intelligence feeds to discover malicious or suspicious activity.

SIEM gives security admins a holistic view of all events happening within their IT environment and helps them detect advanced cyberthreats by using threat intelligence information from various global sources

Although large organizations mainly deploy SIEM solutions, small and medium-sized enterprises can benefit from deploying such a solution to protect their sensitive data. The SIEM market is growing rapidly. According to MarketsandMarkets, the global Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) market size is projected to grow from USD 4.2 billion in 2020 to USD 5.5 billion by 2025.

This article discusses three of the top SIEM solutions that can be used to help secure a network.

Top three SIEM solutions

SolarWinds Security Event Manager SolarWinds is a popular security information and event management solution with a low entry price. It offers the following key features:

• Centralized log collection
• Detect and respond to cyber threats automatically
• Simplify preparing auditing reports to submit them to various compliance regulations such as HIPAA and PCI.
• SolarWinds comes as a virtual appliance that is easy to deploy and manage without advanced expertise.
• It comes with hundreds of connectors to collect logs from different sources, parse their data, and put it into a readable format in a central location. This allows the security team to investigate log data, discover threats and prepare for audit reports.
• It comes with integrated built-in File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) capability, so any malicious modifications to monitored files, folders, and registry settings will trigger an alert.
• Can prevent attaching unmanaged USB drives to your internal network.

ArcSight ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) provides real-time threat detection; it utilizes the Security Open Data Platform, making it able to connect to more than 480 data source types, including threat intelligence collected from cloud sources. It then directs all these sources into one feed to base your security analytics. ArcSight has the following key features:

• Fast real-time detection of threats due to the vast intelligence feeds, default content, ability to define customized rulesets, layered analytics, and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
• Can integrate with existing security analytics solutions, which save costs and increase the Security Operation Center (SOC)'s efficiency.

__IBM QRadar SIEM__text in bold Another popular SIEM solution, the IBM QRadar SIEM, provides actionable insight into the most critical threats allowing the security team to respond quickly to reduce the impact of incidents. It comes with the following key features:

• Comprehensive visibility of all log and events across organization networks and connected cloud environments such as SaaS and IaaS.
• Fully automated solution allowing security teams to see all events related to a particular security threat in one place.
• Real-time threat detection using out-of-box analytics to analyze log data and network flows.
• Provides pre-built reports and related templates to submit to various regulatory bodies.

Summary

Utilizing security solutions to detect cyberattacks and respond efficiently to prevent data breaches becomes a must for almost any organization operating in today's digital age. Leveraging SIEM within your organization can increase its ability to respond to cyber incidents more efficiently before the damage escalates. This article introduced the term SIEM and introduced three of the top SIEM tools.