SIEM for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: What you need to know

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are a frequent target for cybercriminals. How can SIEM help them improve their cybersecurity?

Contrary to what they might believe, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are a favorite target for cybercriminals. Research from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) recently found that 73% of US small business owners experienced a cyberattack in 2023.

Part of the problem is that SMEs grossly underestimate the potential impact of a successful cyberattack. Sky Business found that UK SMEs that have yet to experience a cyberattack underestimate the financial impact by nearly £85,000 – and, as a result, fail to protect themselves. Similarly, many SME budgets don’t stretch to an effective cybersecurity program.

SMEs must find a way to protect themselves without breaking the bank. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions are a great way to achieve this. Let’s look at how.

What is SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)?

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions combine security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) into a single security management system, providing organizations with a centralized location to understand the activities in their IT environments.

At root, SIEM solutions aggregate security event data from disparate security management sources, helping organizations investigate and detect threats, prevent attacks, and consolidate reporting for incident remediation and compliance. They allow security teams to view all their security data from a single point of view, meaning they can identify any unusual behavior patterns.

Why SIEM is Crucial for SMEs

SIEM solutions offer many benefits for SMEs, enhancing their security posture while keeping costs relatively low. So, let’s look at how SIEM solutions can help protect SMEs from cybercrime – without breaking the bank.

Powerful Threat Detection

SIEM solutions correlate security event information in real time and compare it to threat intelligence feeds to detect known and suspected cybersecurity threats. The best SIEM solutions will automate threat detection in the backend and fine-tune alerts to reduce the need for manual intervention and minimize false positives, therefore easing the burden on security teams. Similarly, the vast amount of data from disparate sources SIEM solutions collects helps security teams identify the root cause of security incidents faster than they would otherwise, minimizing potential damage.

Centralized Logging

Because SIEM solutions present all of an organization’s security data from a single pane of glass, it’s much easier for the security team to monitor their security posture. Whereas an organization without a SIEM solution would need significant staff to keep track of data from disparate security solutions and identify, investigate, and respond to potential threats, organizations using SIEM can feasibly protect their organization with a skeleton crew.

Streamlined Compliance

Most modern organizations are subject to data protection regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, or other compliance obligations. SIEM solutions help SMEs demonstrate compliance by continuously generating audit and reporting trails, which organizations can present to regulators. SIEMs also reduce the risk of SMEs suffering a data breach, reducing the risk of violating data protection regulations and paying legal fees.

Automated Incident Response

The best SIEM solutions will have pre-defined playbooks that outline response actions for the most common types of security incidents. When a behavior matches that outlined in an incident playbook, the solution will automatically execute specific actions, including but not limited to isolating compromised systems, blocking malicious IP addresses, initiating vulnerability scans, or opening incident tickets. By automating the incident response process, SIEM solutions can drastically reduce response times and minimize the impact of security events.

Scalability

Most SMEs want to grow their business, so they must look for security solutions to grow with them. The best SIEM solutions use flexible cloud infrastructure, meaning they can adjust computing resources to accommodate changes in data volume and processing demands, allowing them to scale up alongside the organization quickly.

Choosing a SIEM Solution

However, it’s crucial for SMEs to recognize that not all SIEM solutions are equal. Traditional SIEM requires immense financial and human resources to run effectively and typically struggles to scale up.

As such, SMEs should primarily consider automated, preconfigured SIEM-as-a-Service. These solutions are essentially a centralized Security Operations Center (SOC) without the need for an actual SOC, providing SMEs with rapid threat detection, prevention, and response and removing the need for an expanded in-house security team.

When choosing your SIEM-as-a-Service provider, ask yourself and the vendor the following questions:

·         How is the solution configured and deployed?

·         What are the solution’s threat detection capabilities?

·         To what extent is the solution automated?

·         How effective are the solution’s remediation playbooks?

·         What are the solution’s compliance and reporting capabilities?

By answering these questions, you ensure your SIEM-as-a-service solution is a worthwhile investment and, more importantly, suitable for your organization.

Conclusion

All in all, SIEM – particularly SIEM-as-a-Service – can have a transformative impact on the security of SMEs without overstretching their understandably tight budgets. However, choosing an SIEM-as-a-service provider that meets your organization’s needs is essential. Do your research, ask the right questions, and you’ll have an affordable, effective security solution that will protect you from the vast majority of threats.

About the author:
Josh is a Content writer at Bora. He graduated with a degree in Journalism in 2021 and has a background in cybersecurity PR. He’s written on a wide range of topics, from AI to Zero Trust, and is particularly interested in the impacts of cybersecurity on the wider economy.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, cybersecurity)