Data holds value only if analyzed effectively. If your software collects vast amounts of security data from applications and monitoring devices but can’t analyze it correctly, it’s all for nothing. A cloud SIEM tool can help you make sense of this data while providing compliance management and incident response capabilities.

With multiple vendors offering cloud SIEM tools, selecting the perfect one for your needs can be challenging. To help you find the right fit, we’ve created this guide with our detailed analysis of the top five solutions in the market.

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Article Roadmap

• Best Cloud SIEM Tools
  • Splunk Enterprise Security
  • IBM Security QRadar SIEM
  • Microsoft Sentinel
  • LogRhythm Cloud
  • Securonix Unified Defense SIEM
• What Are Cloud SIEM Tools?
• Importance
• Must-Have Features
• FAQs
• Next Steps

Best Cloud SIEM Tools

Our analysts have carefully crafted a list of the best cloud SIEM solutions with top features and benefits to assist your software selection process.

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Splunk Enterprise Security

Splunk enterprise security is one of the most popular cloud SIEM solutions that offers comprehensive risk analytics and threat detection. It’s suitable for medium to large-sized businesses. Industries that can benefit from this platform are financial services, retail, communications, energy and utilities.

Top capabilities include AI and ML integration, forensics, threat intelligence and rapid response security content. It offers an annual pricing model based on the compute capacity of Splunk Virtual Compute (SVC) units.

Gain in-depth visibility on security metrics with the key posture dashboard. Source

Top Benefits

• Identify Risk Objects: Isolate risks, improve situational awareness and get a view of the security operations center with threat topology visualization. It helps identify different risk objects and analyze how they relate to each other. You can display up to 20 risk objects associated with a single threat.
• Centralize Investigation Modules: Streamline post-attack investigation and forensics by centralizing threat intelligence, security and log data, security context, and user and device information. The investigation workbench improves incident review features like investigation timelines, facilitating collaboration and investigation tracking. You can adjust the time range according to the incident to determine the scope of events.
• Access Anomalies Dashboard: Visualize user behavioral anomalies, authentication attempts from different devices, unusual sign-ins and more. Understand threats with in-depth insights on several metrics. You can also apply filters for a more focused view of threats.
• Receive Risk-Based Alerts: Get alerts about identified risks with Splunk Enterprise Security’s correlation search framework. It uses a single risk index and creates customized alerts so you don’t have to respond to less crucial events and can focus on critical ones.
• Gain In-Depth Visibility: Receive high-level insights in real time on exceptionally vital security events on the security posture dashboard. Customize the dashboard to display KPIs, event data, security domains, most recent activities and module changes in the last 24 hours.

Primary Features

• User Behavior Analytics: It offers actionable insights, streamlines investigations and strengthens security through enterprise security integration. It uses AI and ML to analyze user and entity behavior and filter out anomalies and threats to send alerts.
• Threat Intelligence: You can access, prioritize and manage several intelligence feeds. The security administrator can add threat intelligence to the user’s events to correlate indicators of known threats, suspicious activities and potential data breaches.
• Adaptive Response Actions: This feature allows you to improve your incident response process by gathering notable event information and correlating log data details. It includes automated response actions like running a script, initiating a stream capture and modifying risk score.
• Risk Analysis Dashboard: The software lets you track digital assets with assigned risk scores. You can find changes in risk scores, identify assets with the highest and lowest scores and examine events affecting them.
• MITRE ATT&CK Framework: This capability allows you to build situational awareness around harmful incidents. It helps understand adversary behavior, classify attacks, and assess risks and vulnerabilities in your organization.

Limitations

• It monitors only privileged accounts.
• Configuration and setup are complex and require training.
• It doesn’t offer timely updates to UI/UX.

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IBM Security QRadar SIEM

IBM Security QRadar SIEM is another leading cloud SIEM tool that offers robust security, supports multiple third-party integrations and offers threat intelligence feeds. It’s perfect for medium and large-sized industries. IT services, telecommunications, network security and financial services are a few among many industries using this platform.

The platform offers capabilities like behavior analytics, a vulnerability assessment scanner, network threat analytics and over 700 supported integrations. It has two pricing options: basic (user model) and advanced (enterprise model).

Categorize offenses by their magnitude and size on the QRadar dashboard.

Top Benefits

• Prioritize Offenses: Prioritize offenses using a magnitude rating to determine which ones require more attention. You can calculate them based on severity, magnitude and credibility to get the most accurate report.
• Maintain Analyst Workflow: Investigate offenses based on their type and assignees to determine the root cause of an attack and create an effective incident response plan.
• Integrate ML: Use historical data and archives on the QRadar database to set up a normal behavior baseline and create predictive models. Machine learning integrations help add inputs by the user behavior analytics module.
• Investigate Attacks: Detect potential threats, root cause, vulnerabilities and extent of an attack with incident forensics. Retrace the criminal’s actions to map the attack and determine what was compromised accurately.
• Automate Event Logging: Access over 450 device support modules (DSM) and over 370 applications across your IT infrastructure.

Primary Features

• Network Threat Analytics: This module constantly monitors network flow records to identify anomalies in the traffic. A dashboard displays deviations from the normal flow and helps identify suspicious behavior on your network.
• Threat Intelligence: The system offers the IBM X-Force threat intelligence platform with aggregate exchange data. It follows standard open formats like TAXII and STIX to pull intelligence feeds. You can also customize your search, reporting and correlation rules.
• User Behavior Analytics: Monitor user behavior and generate alerts against threatening behavior. It follows predetermined behavior standards and flags any activity deviating from them.
• Ransomware Detection: QRadar SIEM spots known and unknown ransomware in staging, infection and reconnaissance phases. The threat intelligence module also helps detect ransomware file hashes, IP addresses and more.
• Network Flow Devices: You can receive flow from different flow sources or network data sources internally and externally. It supports standard flow protocols like J-Flow, sFlow, NetFlow, Network interface, Napatech interface, IPFIX and more.

Limitations

• Its search query language is complicated.
• The platform doesn’t offer a mobile app.
• It doesn’t provide timely UI/UX updates.

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Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft Sentinel is one of the leading cloud SIEM platforms that can help modernize your security operations centers (SOCs), detect advanced threats and create an effective incident response plan. It’s suitable for medium and large-sized enterprises. Executive sponsors, business analysts and tech writers are among many users of this product.

Its top capabilities include threat hunting, investigations, automated response and watchlists. It has different payment plans based on your data consumption that start from $296 per day and go up to $13,566 per day. You can also avail of the pay-as-you-go plan, which is approximately $4.30 to $5.59 per GB.

Track and investigate incidents with an interactive dashboard. Source

Top Benefits

• Detect Threats in Real-Time: Receive updated information on threats and potential data attacks with near-real-time (NRT) rules that automate the monitoring process. Get quicker and better threat detection with automation and expedite incident response.
• Customize Machine Learning Models: Build your own machine learning models based on your company’s requirements via the BYO-ML platform. It uses the Apache Spark or Azure Databricks environment and Jupyter Notebooks to craft the ML environment.
• Normalize Security Content: Normalize hunting queries, analytics rules and workbooks and store them in Sentinel galleries. Analysts can find built-in normalized content easily and create their own or modify existing content.
• Manage Conjoined Instances: Lighthouse functionality helps correlate, manage, configure and oversee conjoined instances. You can also integrate with cross-tenancy management from Azure Lighthouse.
• Detect Advanced Attacks: Detect advanced multi-staged attacks like advanced persistent threats (APTs), SQL injections and DDoS attacks by identifying event anomalies and suspicious activities at kill chains. It prevents reputation loss and data breaches.

Primary Features

• Threat Hunting: A query tool and hunting search help identify threats across all data sources. Its built-in hunting queries guide you by providing the right questions to ask during the investigation to find issues in security systems.
• Incident Investigation: Use a case management platform to manage and investigate security incidents. It designates case files containing an updated chronology of security threats as incidents.
• Behavior Analytics: It can detect known and unknown threats, insider attacks, and behavior anomalies of compromised users by analyzing predetermined normal behavior.
• Automated Response: Microsoft Sentinel offers advanced automation to help you triage incidents. You can automatically close noisy incidents, assign personnel, add tags and change severity levels.
• Watchlists: This capability allows you to correlate data from data sources with events in your environment. You can use watchlists in detection rules, threat hunting, searching and responding playbooks.

Limitations

• The system doesn’t offer integrated threat intelligence capabilities.
• No compliance reporting features.
• It doesn’t have a mobile support app for iOS and Android.

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LogRhythm Cloud

LogRhythm Cloud is a cloud SIEM tool that provides log management, security analytics, and threat detection and response capabilities. It’s suitable for small, medium and large industries and offers the ease and flexibility of a SaaS solution. Its pricing starts from approximately $28,000; other subscription models are also available.

The platform offers cyber defense capabilities, including data analytics, threat intelligence, advanced intelligence engine, endpoint monitoring and behavioral analysis.

Monitor your cloud infrastructure with the data collection capability. Source

Top Benefits

• Run Diagnostics: Collect log data from LogRhythm components, run platform manager, conduct oversubscription analysis, and perform health and capacity checks. You can get consolidated diagnostics data in a local .zip file.
• Get Analyzer Grid: Monitor and collect raw data from multiple sources to gather forensics data. Categorize vital logs as “events” if they meet specific criteria such as compliance relevance or security.
• Track Logs and Case Data: A collaborative and comprehensive forensics tool lets you create cases to track and document logs and case data. It also documents suspicious alarms and logs.
• Access SOAR: You can efficiently investigate and respond to threats. Identify infected USB ports that suspicious devices infiltrated and block them to minimize the damage.
• Monitor Systems Continuously: Constantly monitor and collect remote and local log data and analyze it to detect threats. It acts as a central log data collector, simplifying system monitoring and log management processes.

Primary Features

• Dashboards: It offers interactive widget-based user interfaces known as dashboards where you can track different metrics of your security status. You can also create, add and customize these dashboards according to your requirements.
• Endpoint Monitoring: Audit log files generated by endpoints across your system. You can integrate this feature with alerting to receive alerts whenever it detects suspicious activities.
• Threat Intelligence: Combine the LogRhythm threat intelligence system and its threat intelligence module to collect and analyze data and provide analysts with updated threat reports.
• Data Collection and Analysis: The platform supports more than 950 third-party data and cloud sources to gather, normalize and analyze data. It can work with thousands of messages per second and interpret cloud-native log sources.
• Advanced Intelligence Engine: This capability offers in-depth visibility into risks, critical operational issues and threats. The advanced intelligence engine integrates with AI to detect deployment conditions over time ranges and multiple data sources.

Limitations

• It lacks a basic mobile app in iOS and Android systems.
• The system doesn’t offer timely UI/UX updates.
• It offers split interfaces requiring users to constantly switch between two environments.

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Securonix Unified Defense SIEM

Securonix Unified Defense SIEM is a comprehensive cloud SIEM tool that offers unified threat detection, investigation and response. It’s ideal for industries of all sizes. Top features include an autonomous threat sweeper, built-in SOAR, Securonix Investigate, Snowflake Data Cloud, content library, threat analytics and advanced coverage analyzer.

You can deploy the platform in three ways:

• Multi-tenant deployment for MSSP and mid-market customers.
• Isolated tenant deployment for medium to large enterprises.
• Dedicated tenant deployment for organizations with stringent privacy requirements.

Securonix exposes third-party activities in your systems and displays details on a dashboard. Source

Top Benefits

• Access Content Library: Create threat content with the latest cloud connectors and business applications using the threat content-as-a-service feature. Access the content library to analyze security gaps, vulnerabilities and security coverages.
• Get a Natural Language Search Engine: Use normalized search syntax and other visualization tools to empower your event investigation with a natural language search engine called Spotter. It’s built on Apache Lucene, a high-performance search engine with accurate search capabilities.
• Simplify Threat Hunting: Streamline threat analytics, indigestion and hunting with easy-to-understand and consistent labels for data absorbed from multiple data sources.
• Automate Exposure Assessment: Detect known and unknown threats quickly by automating security assessment and incident response processes. The autonomous threat sweeper (ATS) uses updated threat content to codify manual investigation parts and make it more efficient.
• Streamline Investigation: Extract context from external and internal data sources automatically. You can add information and notations in the investigation workflow and reports to enrich them without using other complex tools like email, messaging platforms and ticketing systems. Alerting and data enrichment modules provide contextual and up-to-date content.

Primary Features

• Third-Party Intelligence: Securonix Unified Defense SIEM features connectors that integrate third-party intelligence sources to import black-listed malicious domain names and IP addresses. It helps add value to events from web gateways, DLP and firewalls and normalizes data feeds.
• UEBA Capabilities: Use behavior profiling and peer group analytics to detect advanced persistent threats detection and correlate and analyze interactions. It helps find insider threats, cloud data breaches and non-compliance.
• Incident Management: This capability allows your teams to collaborate on incident response and investigation processes. It also offers an interactive dashboard to manage and track cases.
• Threat Modeling: Use threat models to detect, predict, prioritize, investigate and respond to threats. Merge threats and policies to identify similar or related behavior across the network.
• Automated Response: Automatically respond to security events and violations with actionable playbooks. You can get in-depth information on incidents and response management lifecycle. This feature reduces the time spent on incident triage and threat management.

Limitations

• The system has poor customer support.
• It takes time to get familiar with the platform due to the fairly complex interface.
• Role-based access controls are difficult to configure, complex and granular.

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What Are Cloud SIEM Tools?

Cloud SIEM or security information and event management tools are cloud-based SaaS platforms offering data collection, threat monitoring and analysis along with log and event management capabilities. You can deploy them as a standalone solution or as part of a broader security suite.

SIEM platforms combine security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) modules. Together, they offer log management and threat analysis, detection, and response capabilities. Here are the key differences between SIEM, SIM and SEM software:

Importance

Every other attacker leaves a virtual trace in the company’s past log data. Monitoring and analyzing this data can provide in-depth visibility into the latest threat landscape and help create a better incident response plan.

SIEM not only displays the occurrence of an attack but also elaborates on how and why it occurred, making it an absolutely critical component of your cybersecurity arsenal today.

SIEM software’s popularity has grown manifold in recent years. The global SIEM market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 14.5% from 2023 to 2030. One factor driving this popularity is the need for something more advanced than antivirus or firewall to protect a network completely. The additional advantage of log and event management also contributes to its success.

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Must-Have Features

When you look at the wide world of cloud SIEM tools, there’s a lot to digest and always a lot more coming down the pipe. Luckily, with almost all SIEM solutions, a core set of features is included from nearly every vendor. You must look out for these essential features before you finalize a purchase:

• Advanced threat detection
• User and entity behavior analytics
• Threat intelligence
• Log management
• Digital forensics
• Incident response
• Compliance reporting
• Automated risk prioritization, correlation and response
• Content availability
• EDR solutions integration

FAQs

What’s the difference between cloud SIEM and on-premise SIEM?

The primary difference lies in deploying the former on the cloud and hosting it remotely, whereas you can deploy the latter on your company’s hardware and host it locally.

On-premise platforms are cheaper but come with a lot of hidden costs. They offer more security and control over your data. On the other hand, cloud SIEM tools have better scalability, broader scope and provide frequent updates.

What are the limitations of cloud SIEM tools?

Some of the limitations of cloud SIEM solutions include:

• Storage of sensitive data offsite and in transit can face security risks like hacking and breach attempts.
• Cloud SIEM tools are often costly and not suitable for small-sized industries.
• Several vendors offer limited access to raw event data, making it crucial to thoroughly analyze the software before choosing your vendor.
• Some solutions don’t provide timely UI/UX updates.

How does cloud SIEM work?

Cloud SIEM tools collect, analyze and aggregate security log data from multiple sources, including on-premise and cloud-based assets. It helps find virtual trails left by attackers and identify other anomalies, providing alerts about security threats.

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Next Steps

Picking the right cloud SIEM tool can be tricky as there are hundreds of capabilities you need to analyze and compare. With so many vendors offering such tools, you must look out for features that support your existing IT infrastructure and fulfill your company’s requirements, budget and capacity.

If you need help comparing vendors and finding the best fit, check out our free comparison report on top business leaders. This report provides actionable insights into their capabilities, pricing and product reviews.

Which cloud SIEM tool would be the best for your organization? What features do you prefer? Let us know in the comments below!