This blog post was also published in a CloudAwards article.
When it comes to mid-sized and smaller businesses (SMBs), traditional security information and event management (SIEM) systems can seem like an expensive and out-of-reach tool, usually requiring a lot of budget and trained security staff to deploy and tune before beginning to provide useful data. As a result, many businesses either focus their efforts on the endpoint or outsource their detection and response needs to a managed provider. Thankfully, there’s a solution to this challenge that’s built from the ground up to meet this need for SMBs: a rapid-response SIEM.
What’s a SIEM?
Let's quickly define it: A SIEM is a system built to collect, normalize and analyze logs from across the breadth of an environment, whether on-premise or cloud-hosted. The environment can include workstations, firewalls, productivity suites like Microsoft 365 and identity providers like Google Identity Services (GIS) or Microsoft Entra. Through sensors, agents and API integrations, the logs from all of these devices and telemetry can be examined for patterns that represent a likely security threat. A good SIEM will provide broad visibility, good filtering to minimize false alerts, an extensive list of detection rules to identify threats before a breach occurs and quality reporting for audits and reviews. This real-time detection with an expanded view beyond the single workstation or closed vendor ecosystem also helps meet compliance requirements for monitoring and reduces your MTTD (mean time-to-detection) in the event of an actual incident.
Why Are SIEMs Hard for SMBs?
Knowing is half the battle when it comes to finding and stopping threats. So you'd think SIEM would rank highly among IT teams' security priorities, right alongside fundamental measures like strong authentication and backup strategies, right? But traditional SIEM solutions have many roadblocks to successful deployment for SMBs:
- Expensive to Start: Even cloud-hosted SIEM solutions, which avoid hefty up-front hardware costs, can require significant investment in additional integrations or long-term storage and retention of log data. Add in subscription fees and maintenance and the result is often discouragingly steep.
- Expensive to Roll Out: Complex integration and lengthy tuning requirements to reliably produce relevant alerts without extra noise means that it can take weeks or months before the SIEM is fully functioning, adding that much more labor overhead to the team's (or contractor’s) plate.
- Expensive to Maintain: Even a dialed-in traditional SIEM can require a substantial daily investment of review time, clearing alerts and researching potential alerts to find the appropriate response. Log storage charges can also climb quickly, with some vendors charging a much higher rate to analyze data and provide useful findings than simply collecting it.
Enter the Rapid-Response SIEM
What differentiates a rapid-response SIEM is a driving focus on effective, actionable data from day one. Integrations are engineered for deployment in minutes or hours rather than days, and auto-suggested lists of detection rules based on the full inventory of added integrations help shortcut a lot of the tuning process. Finally, a smart suite of pre-configured common reports paired with custom-filtered reporting options simplifies the process of finding important data when it’s most needed. An effective rapid-response SIEM should deliver:
- Lower Costs, Faster ROI: Reducing or eliminating hardware costs, providing affordable logging support built to scale, and cutting down the time to get operational all result in a tool that is worth its budget sooner rather than later.
- Quick Setup, Minimal Maintenance: Integrations shouldn’t require a team of specialists or regular manual updating to stay current.
- Rapid Deployment, Immediate Protection: With simple setup requirements and smart tuning by default, data on potential threats can be collected immediately.
- Compliance and Audit-Ready Reporting: Easy options for reporting from across an organization’s environment benefit not only security but also broader IT awareness needs and other areas of the business. For those responsible for their department’s budget, good reporting can quantify the value the full security stack provides towards keeping the business safe.
The City of Murrieta’s own rapid-response SIEM deployment is a real-world example of this approach. Their IT team needed fast visibility into a ransomware incident, one steadily growing attack trend facing state and local government agencies. These organizations face a tough combination of high attack volume, complex and often overlapping compliance requirements and limited budgets to address both. With their rapid-response SIEM, they gained the ability to see and respond faster to future threats.
“We needed something fast and quick so that we could start getting as much information compiled as possible. I turned on the free version of Blumira and put it into our Microsoft 365 environment. We immediately started getting information within 10 minutes that revealed we had malicious logins from other IPs outside the United States; credentials being changed,” said Michael Amado, IT program administrator. “We discovered that it was no longer just on-prem. They were moving to our cloud environments as well.”
Building for the Needs of Every Organization
Most security solutions are tailored to the needs of enterprise customers, who usually have sizable in-house security teams to match their sizable budgets. But the SMBs that make up 99.9% of all businesses in the U.S. need tools that maximize what they’re already using without adding too much overhead and can give them the security they need without demanding overworked IT teams learn a whole new specialization. Rapid-response SIEM solutions ensure that IT teams can gain full visibility and quickly identify risks regardless of the combination of vendors and services a business relies on.
See More Clearly Today with a Rapid-Response SIEM
Better SIEM options for mid-sized and smaller businesses with limited IT resources help democratize security and keep more companies and their customers safe from data breaches and other incidents. Simplifying deployment and management, providing expert detections out-of-the-box and solid reporting support can improve the value of existing security solutions across an organization’s environment, stopping breaches before they happen.
