’S Path to the Top of Log Management Platforms

SIEM tools began as two separate entities: Security Information Management and Security Event Management. These two systems were merged together to make log analyses easier and more simple.  Now, the other areas being combined with security information and event management is GRC.

GRC is the umbrella term covering an organization’s approach to governance, risk management and compliance. Because these concerns, much like the security concerns are closely related to each other, they are being aligned to some extent in order to avoid conflicts, wasteful business overlaps and gaps in coverage.

Most people in the industry expect further consolidation as more vendors try to pull three prongs of SIEM, GRC and security infrastructure together.”

Info-Tech Research Group Member Jessica Ireland stated that over the past few years “The (security event and security management ) products keep getting better. We are seeing a lot of fluid and intuitive interfaces which make SIEM easier for clients to use.”

One of the great things Jessica Ireland mentions about SIEM tools is the “replay” function that makes interface extremely simple. This enables the administrator to develop a new policy for times when specific events or incidents occur.

Recently, SIEM platforms have evolved even more to collect data and information about users’ behaviors and data access. Now, they can collect data from hundreds of different sources such as hardware devices, virtual machines and applications. Examples of these sources are Microsoft Exchange and Oracle Databases.

With all of these great new SIEM technology offerings, it is becoming easier and easier to improve business productivity with log data analyses.

When you stop to think about it, it is incredible the way technology has advanced over the past few years. As a business owner, it is crucial to take advantage of valuable products like SIEM tools and Log Analytical Software.

Symantec SIEM Gives Real-Time Security Information

Symantec Security Information Manager is a comprehensive SIEM solution that offers enterprise-wide log collection, management and retention. It enables organizations to centralize and analyze large amounts of diverse log data. 

One such example of how Symantec has helped companies is PGi.  This innovative webinar and mobile conferencing company needed to protect its diverse, heterogeneous environment of 2,000 endpoints. To accomplish this, PGi turned to Symantec security solutions. Key benefits included improved risk posture and protection of its valuable customer data.

Symantec’s industry-leading correlation engine brings together organizational data, security event information and threat intelligence. It allows organizations to prioritize security incident response activities based on business risk. This proactive approach allows online business owners to more effectively defend their enterprises from threats while demonstrating compliance with industry regulations.

Key Features of Symantec:

• Supports virtual environment deployments
• Soft appliance deployments
• Custom log management/universal collectors
• Over 150 out-of-box compliance reporting templates
• Multi-conditional correlation rules

Key Benefits Associated with Symantec’s Features:

• Leveraging its highly scalable architecture to aggregate and normalize large quantities of diverse event data, Symantec Security Information Manager gives security leaders a composite view of potential threats and security exposures.
  
  
• Symantec Security Information Manager brings together event, threat and organizational data, allowing organizations to prioritize and remediate incidents based on business risk. Symantec Security Information Manager collects and analyzes events in real time using rules-based correlation.
  
  
• Offering over 200 predefined source collectors, Symantec Security Information Manager’s log collection capability gathers event logs from a wide range of sources throughout your infrastructure. If required, custom collectors may also be created to collect information from unique business applications and data sources.
  
  
• Symantec Security Information Manager provides a real-time correlation engine with more than 80 predefined rules, covering a wide range of security signatures, to detect and identify malicious activities.
  
  
• Symantec Security Information Manager helps security leaders demonstrate compliance by offering more than 400 out-of-the-box dashboards, reports and queries. Because all content is available in easy to use templates, customization is significantly simplified.

In fact, Symantec was honored as one of the world’s most ethical companies. In an official blog, Symantec states why that was the case: “Operating with integrity, and with a sharp focus on ethics and compliance, is the foundation of the corporate responsibility we have for all of our stakeholders. What we do and how we do it matters. It matters to our employees. It matters to our customers. It matters to our shareholders, our suppliers, our partners, and everyone we work with around the globe.”

If you need a proven, trustworthy SIEM partner, choose Symantec.

What SIEM Is and How You Can Make More Money by Using It

Using SIEM tools is one of the easiest ways for online business owners to make more money. SIEM is the combination of two different products:

1.      SIM ~ Stands for Security Information Management. It gathers and creates reports from security logs.

2.      SEM ~ Stands for Security Event Management. It uses event correlation and alerting to help with the analysis of security events.

SIEM stands for Security Information and Event Management. It utilizes log management tools to collect and report data that is captured behind the scenes. In order to benefit from the features that SIEM solutions offer, an organization has to be able to monitor and respond to the events discovered in the security logs.

At a minimum, a log review process should already be in place to ensure that the appropriate resources are committed to a regular review of the security logs and that investigations of anomalous events can be carried in out in a timely manner. Business owners can find log analyzer systems for this at reasonable prices that offer everything they need.

Another important consideration is that the business or business owner must be willing to commit resources to the maintenance, adjustments and evolution of the tool. SIEM tools will organize specific data on a specific computer connected to a specific website. But it is the business owner’s responsibility to act upon the information obtained from these tools in a timely manner for the business to receive any benefit.

Event correlation, one of the defining characteristics of a SIEM product, cannot turn raw log data into actionable information. Most SIEM tools provide a generic set of default correlation rules, conditions or dashboards that in most cases are not the perfect fit for every organization.

It is recommended that business owners receiving information, events and alerts from SIEM tools take the data received and act upon it. For example, if you are a business owner that has received log data showing 80% of your customers view a specific website to get to your product page, it makes sense that you spend energy and resources to promote that website more often and more efficiently by improving the design and figuring out through link or content marketing how to direct more potential customers to that site.

This decisive action will increase your traffic generation and should boost your profits as well. SIEM tools are often undervalued because most people do not understand what they are and how to best utilize them to productively optimize their business. Wise business owners, however, have figured out that appropriating responding to knowledge garnered by SIEM tools can bring substantial success.

Make More Money Using SIEM Tools

Are you a business owner that wants to make more money with your online business? SIEM tools can help!

Let’s answer a few common questions to help you better understand what SIEM Tools are and how they can help you.

1.         What does SIEM stand for? Security Information(or Incident) and Event Management.

2.         What are SIEM Tools? They are tools that provide real-time analysis of security alerts generated by network hardware and applications. 

Basically, they will help organize all information from web analytics software so that online business owners are able to better understand what they can do to increase their traffic generation, helping them make more money.

3.         Why are SIEM Tools important? SIEM tools areuseful for many reasons, a few of their capabilities are:

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Data Aggregation – This will provide the ability to consolidate monitored data through networking sources and web logs to help avoid missing crucial events.

o   This will also help website owners be able to catch any errors in the way that they are currently bringing clients to their websites to help increase traffic generation.

·         Correlation – Another great thing about SIEM Tools is that they help businesses find common attributes and will automatically link together these correlations into meaningful bundles. This technology will help organize website data to help their IT department know how to improve websites.

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Alerting – SIEM Tools are designed to automatically alert business owners of correlated events and production alerts so that they can address issues immediately.

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Retention – As a business owner, it is important to be able to obtain customers and then strive to do whatever it takes to keep them loyal to the brand and the business. SIEM solutions will store historical data for long-periods of time to provide the necessary information to retain needed data. Not only will SIEM tools provide information for business owners to be able to improve their website and business, but it will also retain all documentation for your records, just in case.

Although SIEM tools are a very crucial part of running a successful online business, they are often over-looked and misunderstood. By understanding how Security Information and Event Management can help you organize web analytics, online businesses will be able to increase their traffic generation and overall profits.