SIM Migration: When, Why, How and What to do
SIEMs are at the heart of cybersecurity operations and are a critical part of how cybersecurity teams manage the collection, flow, and protection of critical data that enters their system. Being at the heart of SOC operations at both a technical and a security data management level, SIEMs are an integral part of almost every large organization’s security arsenal.
Their importance only underscores the difficulty that cybersecurity leaders and organizations must face when it comes to switching and migrating to a new SIEM. As with all technology, there comes a time when an organization should consider replacing their SIEM with an alternative that is a better fit for the organization’s needs and requirements.
What does SIEM stand for? What is a SIEM?
“Security Information and Event Management” solutions, shortened by cybersecurity teams as “SIEM”, are technology platforms built to enable organizations to identify and address potential security threats proactively, and prevent potential disruptions to business activities.
SIEM, pronounced “Sim,” combines security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) into a unified security management platform. This technology gathers event log data from various sources, detects anomalies through real-time analysis, and initiates suitable responses.
Essentially, SIEM provides organizations with insights into network activities, enabling quick responses to potential cyber threats and ensuring compliance with regulations.
Over the last ten years, SIEM technology has advanced, leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance the speed and intelligence of threat detection and incident response.
What is a SIEM for cloud security?
Over the last few decades, the importance of SIEMs has increased as organizations have migrated from purely “on-prem” to cloud-based, hybrid, or multi-cloud security configurations. By collating all security data into one platform, it made it easier for enterprises to architect their new security data infrastructure. SIEMs have therefore enabled a generation of enterprise security systems and has made the transformation towards cloud computing – in part or in full measure – possible.
Organizations that have struggled to migrate from legacy SIEMs are facing slow, cumbersome, and difficult to use platforms with ballooning costs. Here are some of the challenges SOCs are facing with SIEMs today – and why many SOCs are contemplating a shift to a next-generation SIEM.
Legacy SIEMs are not scalable for the modern enterprise SOC, as they are unable to manage ingestion of the growing volume of security and log data, which leads to ballooning costs and lowered performance. Additionally, legacy SIEMs must be reconfigured to collect data from modern multi-cloud and hybrid security stacks which add unsustainable pressure to SOCs as they must integrate multiple sources and route data to the SIEMs.
SIEM solutions that are unable to leverage smarter correlation rules and contextualization lead to security alerts that relate to legitimate behaviors and activities, creating many false positives. False positives drain IT security teams’ investigation times, resources, attention, and effort and can also distract from legitimate threats due to alert fatigue.
First generation SIEMs were not designed or configured to manage data ingestion from hybrid, multi-cloud, and distributed IT environments; as such, they do not provide comprehensive visibility the data flow, creating blind spots that can be exploited by malicious actors. Further, legacy SIEMs are ill-equipped to provide a knowledge layer and an analytics layer to help SOCs and cybersecurity leadership manage their security data better, which is something next-generation SIEMs are better able to manage.
SIEMs generate massive amounts of data, and retaining such volumes of data for both compliance and threat investigations can be difficult and expensive. Retaining a high volume of data providers greater history and context which enables smarter and more effective threat hunting and alerting, and organizations have compliance requirements to retain log and cybersecurity data for periods of time. Legacy SIEMs lock data into specific formats, meaning that organizations would be obligated to retaining SIEMs just to ensure that the data stored through them is accessible.
SIEM Migration – what are the challenges?
Clearly, the difficulty of operating a legacy SIEM – and the numerous sub-optimal outcomes – make a strong case for enterprises to migrate to a new, next-generation SIEM. However, SIEM migrations are incredibly and notoriously complex. Many SOCs choose to put up with more expensive and less effective SIEMs because they want to avoid the Herculean task that a SIEM migration represents.
The input effort and the time-to-value make it difficult for CISOs and SOC leadership to accept the bandwidth cost to make the transition. There are many important decisions and choices to be made that can help make the decision more rewarding and more palatable in terms of both the input efforts and the outcomes.
