The concept of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems was created in 2005 by Gartner to recognize tools that collect logs from multiple data sources to detect abnormal activity.
Today, Security information and event management (SIEM) solutions are crucial security tools that alert IT and security teams about potential attacks. By collecting, storing, and analyzing security data across broad networks and data sources, a SIEM puts organizations in a better position to detect and respond to escalating threats.
As the threat landscape skyrockets and breaches occur at breakneck pace, just being aware of a breach is a crucial component of the incident response operation. But what if the incident is not logged or if you aren’t alerted?
As businesses embrace digital transformation and move more workloads and workflows to the cloud, their security tools and solutions must move with them — including SIEM.
This article will explore the benefits of SIEM and why cloud plays such a key role.
We will also explain:
A cloud-based SIEM allows IT teams to manage threats with more flexibility, convenience, and power across multiple environments. With a cloud-native SIEM, logs and data from on-premise and cloud environments can be managed from a single pane of glass solution.
It’s also important to note that there are several terminologies for a cloud-native SIEM. Cloud-delivered SIEM and SIEM-as-a-Service are other names that can be used interchangeably with cloud-based SIEM.
Especially in today’s dynamic workplace with more work from home (WFH) and hybrid environments, a cloud-delivered SIEM is crucial to support the shifting of critical workloads outside the confines of on-premise networks and systems. With a cloud-native SIEM, all users, servers, devices, applications, and other endpoints can be monitored and managed effectively and efficiently. Typically, everything is visible from a single cloud-based dashboard.
Most importantly, cloud-based SIEMs are built to scale; as an organization grows, cloud SIEM solutions should provide all the agility and scalability to handle massive amounts of data.
The most apparent difference is hosting location: one in the cloud and the other in the office.
But when we start exploring the differences between the two SIEM types, the discussion becomes more about the benefits of a cloud-based SIEM.
Here are a few distinctions you should be aware of that underscore the advantages of a cloud-based SIEM.
With on-premise SIEM, the deployment process to get systems fully functional is typically lengthy. A cloud-based SIEM, on the other hand, allows organizations to customize and deploy the solutions much more quickly. Without any hardware to set up or manual maintenance and upgrades to worry about, speed of deployment is increased substantially with a cloud-native SIEM.
Not long ago, SIEM solutions were rife with complexities that demanded a high level of expertise to deploy and manage. But today’s cloud-based SIEMs are designed so that anyone with fundamental IT knowledge can easily configure and maintain the solution. Plus, organizations don’t need to devote more staff to manage it.
On-premise solutions require a large investment in hardware and software that, in some cases, may become obsolete. With cloud, the transition from CAPEX to OPEX is much smoother and won’t require a refresh.
With on-premise SIEM, keeping up to date with new technologies and capabilities can be overwhelming. Cloud-based SIEM reduces the headaches that can arise from too many updates, and allows organizations to scale as needed.
With a modern cloud-based SIEM, threats can be detected in real-time with minimal traffic overhead and increased processing power. Logs can be analyzed immediately as they are fed into the SIEM. With traditional SIEM, detection analysis is often delayed until traffic flow is less demanding on the solution.
Serverless data architectures, as the name suggests, run entirely on cloud infrastructure.
With a Serverless data architecture, organizations can leverage the same SaaS-based software model for their data stores that they use for email, documents or other critical applications.
This means there’s no physical or virtual hardware and software to deploy, configure or manage.
Plus, serverless brings an abstraction of application scaling, meaning that if there are no requests coming in, nothing is running. If a torrent of requests come in, the architecture can automatically scale up the instances serving those requests.
And finally, ongoing management, maintenance and upgrades for the architecture at the platform level are handled by the platform provider.
When it comes to SIEM management, a Serverless data architecture allows security teams to take threat detection and incident response to the next level. After all, speed, scale and flexibility are critical elements to any detection and response strategy.
Using Panther, security teams are freed from the slow performance, heavy operational overhead, and high cost of traditional SIEM. Panther Labs empowers security teams to build world-class threat detection and incident response operations at scale by adopting a developer-centric approach.
Because ultimately, security teams need to focus more on security and less on operations.
With Panther, your security teams can:
To learn more about how Panther can make security monitoring fast, flexible, and scalable for all security teams, book a demo with us.
