Security is one of the most vital aspects of providing cloud services and frameworks. But you can’t protect your IT infrastructure without detecting threats before they infiltrate your system. Integrating SIEM into your existing modules enhances visibility and accelerates threat detection. This guide discusses how SIEM integration ensures robust protection against cybersecurity risks and enhances your overall security posture.

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This Article Covers

• What Is SIEM Integration?
• Primary Benefits
• How To Operationalize SIEM Integration
• Best Practices
• SIEM and Mainframes
• Next Steps

What Is SIEM Integration?

SIEM integration is the process of connecting security information and event management (SIEM) tools with your existing security modules for better coordination and deeper visibility into IT and cloud infrastructure. It ensures seamless data flow and enables centralized data collection, continuous endpoint monitoring and analysis, and security event correlation.

SIEM solutions primarily collect and integrate security event data across your IT infrastructure, correlating and analyzing it to identify suspicious activities. It issues alerts after identifying such incidents and also provides remedial solutions. It works through three modules:

• The data collection module collects, correlates and analyzes event and security data from your entire network.
• It identifies and detects suspicious activities and potential threats through the threat detection system.
• The threat response module then provides alerts and warnings on your dashboard, along with actionable reports for handling the threat.

Primary Benefits

SIEM offers a layered security approach to your organization’s cloud infrastructure. However, that’s not all. Here are some other benefits of SIEM integration:

Efficient Threat Detection

SIEM integration provides a holistic view of your security systems, enhancing visibility and increasing the chances of threat detection. It also helps improve the mean time to respond (MTTR) and mean time to detect (MTTD).

The system enables you to identify advanced threats like insider threats, advanced persistent threats, brute force attacks, credential stuffing, DDoS attacks and zero-day attacks, which individual security solutions might otherwise overlook.

Centralized Monitoring and Reporting

Different IT modules generate large amounts of event data throughout your network. Collecting it manually can be daunting and may consume a significant amount of time and resources. A centralized console helps monitor and analyze this data in a single location and generate detailed reports.

Real-Time Incident Response

You get real-time alerts and notifications when any security incident occurs. Its rapid detection and alerting features empower you to respond to these incidents immediately. Real-time responses allow your organization to minimize the impact of security breaches, reduce the dwell time of threats and take swift action to mitigate risks effectively.

Enhanced Forensic Analysis

In cases of breaches and hacking attempts, gathering data and performing forensics provides you with knowledge about the attack, helping craft better security policies in the future. With this data, security operations centers (SOC) can trace the progression of an attack, identify the point of entry and understand the scope of the breach.

Seamless Integration

Modern SIEM solutions are designed to seamlessly integrate with other security platforms in your network, boosting threat detection and alerting capabilities. They can connect with existing solutions, including endpoint protection platforms, intrusion detection and prevention systems, firewalls, vulnerability assessment tools, data loss prevention (DLP) systems, user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), network traffic analysis (NTA), and incident response platforms.

Better Decision and Policy Making

You can’t make better security policies if you don’t have detailed information about what’s going on in your IT systems. SIEM integration offers in-depth security analysis and actionable reports to design robust policies. It can help your analysts spot patterns and understand your organization’s security landscape.

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How To Operationalize SIEM Integration

Operationalizing SIEM signifies the process of effectively integrating SIEM solutions with your existing security tools and various data sources. Here’s how you can do it best:

Incident Response Automation

Manual incident response consumes time and resources. You can use orchestration tools and playbooks to establish automated response actions. This helps decrease response time and expedite threat containment.

Data Source Integration

SIEM’s primary capabilities include collecting log and event data from multiple sources across your network. Ensuring it has access to relevant data sources can increase visibility and coordination. You should include data sources such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, antivirus solutions, endpoints, servers and applications in your SIEM integration.

Real-Time Reporting and Alerting

Besides collecting event and log data, SIEM systems also analyze it and generate actionable reports. They offer real-time monitoring and alerting capabilities, ensuring you receive immediate notifications upon detecting suspicious activities or security incidents. You can also implement appropriate escalation procedures for critical alerts to ensure timely response and resolution.

Incident Triage

Every security system generates thousands of alerts each day triggered by suspicious activities. You must classify these threats based on their severity and potential impact. Incident Triage helps prioritize and handle these alerts effectively.

Threat Intelligence Integration

SIEM is a powerful threat detection tool, and integrating it with threat intelligence feeds further enriches data and enhances detection capabilities. In the ever-evolving global threat landscape, threat intelligence offers more context and provides visibility into known and unknown threats. It offers evidence-based information to finetune SIEM integration automation and other protocols.

Complete Compliance Reporting

Maintaining compliance with regulations and organizing audits can be time-consuming and tedious. With SIEM integration, you can automatically comply with several common standards, such as PCI DSS, GDPR and HIPAA, relieving IT teams from manual tasks.

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Best Practices

To achieve maximum defense capabilities and optimal performance with integrated SIEM tools, consider the following best practices:

Define Your Requirements

Before investing in new software, you must determine the requirements and goals of your integration project.

First, identify fundamental issues with your security landscape that you aim to address through SIEM integration and lay down measurable objectives. You must align your organization’s security approach with your integration efforts to ensure a focused and comprehensive defense strategy.

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Ensure Compatibility

Interoperability and compatibility are primary considerations before moving forward with integration. Conduct thorough research on your product to ensure it supports data exchange protocols like Common Event Format (CEF) or Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP). Also, you must request test implementation to validate the compatibility of your systems.

Execute Data Mapping and Normalization

Accurate and meaningful data analysis are key capabilities of SIEM tools, achieved through data mapping and normalization. You must establish a standardized data mapping process with aligned data fields to normalize them into a common format. This enables you to consistently correlate security events throughout the integrated solution.

Implement Data Sharing Protocols

To enhance data interoperability and streamline the integration process, you must establish standardized protocols for data sharing. These include Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), RESTful API and syslog, which facilitate data sharing between systems for seamless data flow.

Monitor Integration Results

Regularly monitor and review the correlation of data, accuracy and alerting system to gain a comprehensive understanding of results. Constant and timely monitoring helps you stay on top of any SIEM integration gaps, allowing you to remediate them immediately.

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SIEM and Mainframes

Historically, organizations have trusted mainframes for securing sensitive data and processing high-value transactions due to their isolation from the digital world. Cybersecurity companies continue to rely on mainframe technology for safeguarding vital applications like transaction processing (OLTP), batch processing, warehouse logistics and telecommunications.

Unlike standardized formats in modern IT solutions, mainframes predominantly employ non-standard or proprietary logging formats. However, with their growing popularity and usage in critical transactions, mainframes have become more vulnerable to malicious attacks.

Despite some technical and security gaps, SIEM solutions have now become popular among IT teams due to their ability to handle a diverse range of event data with instantaneous delivery. To overcome these gaps, consider integrating SIEM into your mainframe systems. During integration, use syslog and other specialized log forwarding agents to transmit mainframe event data into SIEM.

Additionally, enrich mainframe data by integrating threat intelligence, machine learning and AI technologies. Continuous monitoring of mainframe applications is also crucial for implementing effective security measures.

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Next Steps

With the growing importance of data protection in businesses with digital assets, you can no longer take any chances. SIEM integration has become unavoidable in achieving robust security for your business.

If you need further help selecting the best SIEM software, check out our free comparison report that lets you analyze the leading systems in the market.

What key security concerns are you looking to address with SIEM integration? Do let us know in the comments below!