Greater Security for Small Businesses: Why Do SMEs Need a SIEM System?

Recently, the number of cyber attacks has been increasing steadily. It’s important to bear in mind that the more software and hardware the corporate infrastructure contains, the higher the chance of experiencing failures and problems within IT-infrastructure.

In order to ensure control of external and internal information security risks, large companies have been implementing specific protective tools for a while. First of all, these are SIEM systems. Simultaneously, small companies often remain vulnerable in terms of the abovementioned risks, neglect protection of their own business and don’t rush with ensuring protection. In this article I’ll reveal, why implementation of SIEM systems is beneficial for SMEs and how to choose the system, that really suits your company’s needs.

Brief Description of SIEM Systems

Even small organizations use large number of technologies and various software, for example, firewalls, antiviruses, email, data base management systems etc. SIEM systems are developed for monitoring of complex IT-infrastructure, gathering and performing analysis of security events, revealing potential threats and targeted attacks in real life mode. The system notifies information security specialists about violations, failures and other problems. Data from SIEM system is also used for performing of corporate investigations. The system keeps archive with details on infrastructure operation for previous periods to ensure the availability of data if necessary.

Why SMEs Need SIEM Systems

1. Ensure protection of IT-infrastructure

Each infrastructure object is a potential entrance point in the corporate infrastructure for malicious actors. Any infrastructure object may cause technical issues for the infrastructure or be exploited by malicious insiders for hacking, disabling IT system etc. SIEM systems gather and analyze data from various sources: employees’ workstations, network scanners, servers, database management systems, programs etc. In fact, an organization remains under SIEM system’s 24/7 supervision.

2. Automate routine processes

SMEs often don’t have large IT and IS departments, thus, the task of automation of control over events in the IT infrastructure is an extremely actual one. Millions of security events are generated in the IT infrastructure of even small company on an everyday basis. It’s too labor-intensive to analyze all of them manually. And it’s even more difficult to detect dangerous activities and incidents in the overall event flows. SIEM systems optimize IS specialists work processes: software gathers events from various sources and thanks to the embedded analytical tools establish a correlation between them and notifies employees in charge about the threat.

3. Ensure control of network equipment

SIEM systems enable to ensure control of equipment condition and don’t leave processes to chance. For example, a server equipment’s change of temperature may indicate a serious failure, in some cases it may even alert that fire is about to begin. The system detects overheat, what enables to obtain the issue just in time and eliminate it. SIEM systems ensure protection against such situations as failure of equipment, due to which the organization may temporarily become inoperable.

4. Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements

Due to the increasing amount of cyber risks and ongoing sophistication of threats, SIEM systems are becoming more and more crucial components of ensuring corporate protection. SIEM class systems are crucial components of ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, as they are capable of obtaining and analyzing data, related to security events within the whole corporate infrastructure and revelation of potential vulnerabilities and incidents. SIEM system should also provide the required functionality for performing full-scale work flow for performing incident investigations.

How to choose the SIEM system, which really suits your organization’s needs

Despite there are numerous SIEM systems available on the market, their functionality varies significantly. When choosing the solution, it’s crucial to examine the conditions of implementation, usage and tasks, which the SIEM system is capable solving.

Which aspects are recommended to consider:

1. Speed of implementation and functionality, available “out-of-the-box”

14% of respondents, who took part in the survey by SearchInform stated potential labor costs for implementation, configuration and customization of a SIEM system as the prerequisites, why their companies didn’t purchase a SIEM. However, there are solutions, which work out-of-the-box and don’t require serious labor costs. The system should be deployed quickly, don’t interrupt business processes or cause conflicts with IT infrastructure. Immediately upon the deployment SIEM should efficiently reveal software&hardware failures, targeted attacks, potentially dangerous users’ actions.

2. 2. Simplicity of administration

Most part of respondents claim that it’s a very complicated task for them to work with the SIEM system. That’s why when choosing protective solution companies should assess the system’s usability: IS and IT specialists with almost any experience should be able to work with the system. For example, to configure correlation rules in some SIEM class solutions, it’s required to have some programming skills. In SearchInform SIEM this task was eased as much as possible: such rules can be configured in just a few clicks.

3. Cost of SIEM system ownership and licensing model

SIEM system should offer the transparent system of licensing to make sure that customers can optimize budgets, allocated on protection of infrastructure. For example, if SIEM system licensing system is based on the number of hosts, customer will initially understand how much the deployment will cost.

It’s also important to understand that implementation of SIEM system can be accompanied with some other ongoing expenditures, thus, it’s also required to pay attention to the hardware requirements. In case the requirements are high, the server, for example, will be expensive and not any SME will be capable of purchasing such system.

Why SIEM system is important for ensuring protection of small companies

Cyber threat landscapes evolve permanently and new risks occur regularly. These risks should be detected just in time. Detection of security events and timely response to them will reduce the threats, related to cyber attacks in small companies.

SIEM systems enable to combine functionality of a few tools: accumulate details on security events, ensure monitoring of infrastructure hardware, reveal incident in the link of events and notify IS officer.

The best way to ensure that the really solution suits your needs is to request a free trail. Thus, you’ll obtain the first results before purchase of license, evaluate system’s workability, reliability and capabilities.

About the Author

Sergio Bertoni is the Leading Analyst at SearchInform which is the global risk management tools developer. Sergio has plenty of hands-on experience in the sphere of information security and has been contributing to the company’s success for years. Sergio comments on different infosec topics, including information security trends and new methods of fraud (from simple phishing to deepfakes), provides advice on how to ensure security of communication channels and shares best practices for organizing information security protection of businesses. Sergio can be reached online at our company website https://searchinform.com/