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.
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.
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:
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:
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.”
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.
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.