Key trends in threat management using SIEM & SOAR
SIEM solution is an essential tool in today’s world. Having SIEM solutions ensures that organizations have proactive monitoring to detect potential threats and act on them accordingly. It helps organizations to have an additional eye on the log sources integrated with SIEM. It is useful in retaining logs for a longer duration based on compliance requirements.
SIEM collects logs from different types of devices, normalizes and store them in their database. It helps organizations/teams with reports/alerts as per contents created in the solution. SIEM detects potential threats. When it comes to acting upon them, most of the SIEM in the market either depends on 3rd party solution or require additional configuration to enable this feature. Many popular SIEMs vendors have either acquired a 3rd party SOAR or built their SOAR offering to fill in the void of capabilities left by their SIEM platform.
Splunk acquired Phantom. IBM QRadar (its SIEM) has Resilience as its SOAR.
With SOAR in trend, one can create playbooks for the use cases and make sure that any critical issues are acted upon automatically based on the playbooks’ parameters. Automation of use cases is one of SOAR’s key features that helps SOC and allows analysts to focus on more critical tasks.
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning in SIEM & SOAR
Artificial Intelligence (AI) helps solve problems by its ability to learn, understand, reason, and remember from experience. AI systems can combine information from various sources, correlate the data, and act on the insights derived from the data. Machine learning (ML) is a part of AI that trains systems to learn and make decisions without providing instructions for each scenario. It uses algorithms to learn from existing data and past experiences to improve themselves. ML models also look for patterns in data and conclude on solutions. UEBA uses AI & ML to derive user behavior based on base-lining done on events and triggers an alarm in any abnormality.
AI is excellent at distinguishing between normal and abnormal behavior. ML models can perform preliminary inquiries on detected threats and bring down many false positives that occur in security systems.
In a business environment, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems equipped with AI and ML can effectively manage the threat detection workflows in your network.
How cloud platforms are playing an essential role in SIEM & SOAR
Today’s growing businesses face immense challenges in detecting and responding to increasing cyber threats/attacks with on-prem SIEM solutions.
Considering the factors like maintainability, scalability, usability, performance, data/logs portability, availability, etc., cloud-based native SIEM has an advantage over on-premises SIEM solution. It allows a pay per user model, enabling quick scaling up or scaling down to reduce the costs.
Most cloud service providers are providing SIEM through the SAAS-based model. They take care of the infrastructure and build everything for the customer. The customer needs to set it up, create some connections, and automate it as per need.
Using Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), data are collected from different sources, endpoints, and respond to most security events without human intervention. Cloud-native SIEM provides automation and playbooks such as creating an incident and containment of incidents by blocking the IP address where the ticketing tools are integrated with endpoints (IPS/Firewall). The integrations are done with a few clicks. SOAR helps to automate and orchestrate the workflows, processes, policy execution, and reporting.
Major players in cloud-native SIEM & SOAR space
Below are the significant players providing cloud-native SIEM & SOAR solutions:
Here are a few major SOAR solution providers:
Why cloud-native SIEM & SOAR is getting more attention
Cloud-native SIEM & SOAR solutions ensure cost savings, robust performance, scalability, and AI-ML automation advantages.
Below are the key SIEM & SOAR features which are getting a lot of attention from the CXO community:
Cost optimization
As per an IDG survey of 300 IT/security leaders, switching to a cloud-based SIEM & SOAR solution helped reduce 40% lower staffing costs and 40% Opex and 34% Capex.
Compliance
Cloud-native SIEM & SOAR solutions provide centralized compliance reporting and a consolidated dashboard for compliance standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS.
Cloud-Scale
Guarantees flexibility to scale in terms of storage and compute. It can be integrated with multiple devices, applications with faster implementation time. There is no cost involved for hardware and admin/console management.
AI - ML powered threat hunting and threat intelligence
It is easier to integrate various AI-ML powered threat intelligence and threat hunting platforms. This helps to have faster incidence response time and real-time threat hunting with a vast set of threat intelligence repositories.
Automation
Most of these cloud-based SIEM & SOAR solutions provide a lot of flexibility to do automation for playbooks, workbooks, and use cases.
Consider these factors while choosing a cloud-native SIEM & SOAR solution for effective threat management
Enterprises can establish a strong threat management strategy by leveraging cloud-native SIEM & SOAR solution. This solution can enable defining and executing AI-ML powered threat hunting & threat intelligence capabilities by utilizing automation for playbooks, workgroups, and use cases.
Below are the few good practices and features that can be considered while adopting a cloud-native SIEM & SOAR solution.
- Easy integration features with existing third-party and cloud-native security solutions.
- A large repository of threat Intelligence with ML Models.
- Scalable computing and storage capacities for log sources to support large ingestions.
- Consolidated dashboards for compliance reporting and threat management posture.
- Huge set of data connectors for partner solutions with various log formats for integrations.
- Pre-built queries and notebooks to visualize the attacks with built-in SOAR and automation with scalable playbooks.
Credits to Subject Matter Experts:
Suhas Desai - SVP & Business Head, Rakesh Sardesai - SOC Manager, Reetesh Kumar - Lead Consultant.
To know more about cloud-native SIEM & SOAR solutions and understand why it is a strategic security asset in ensuring enterprise security, talk to Aujas experts at contact@aujas.com.
