6 Best Practices for Successful SIEM Implementation 
Tags: security
Published: 2019-08-06 08:54:26

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Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)  is a powerful cybersecurity tool that protects organizations against threats and incidents. After reading this post, you will understand what is SIEM, how it can benefit the security of your organization and what are the best steps and practices to successfully implement SIEM.

## What Is SIEM?
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a cyber security solution that uses a set of rules and statistical correlations to turn even and log entries from security systems into actionable intel. Security teams can use the information provided by SIEM to detect threats in real-time, manage incident response efforts, investigate past events and form audits for compliance purposes.

### Why You Should Use SIEM?
Security Operations Center (SOC) staff can use the data provided by SIEM on real-time and historical events to identify irregularities, vulnerabilities and incidents and establish better security protocols and focus mitigation efforts. 

### SIEM has a number of benefits for the SOC:

* **Data clustering—clusters data from various sources such as from databases, applications, network, security, servers and other systems like Anti-Virus (AV) and firewalls.
* **Correlation—creates meaningful bundles of event-related data to represent security threats, incidents, vulnerabilities and forensic results.
* **Automated alerts—analyses events to alert SOC staff on urgent problems via different kinds of messaging options, emails or security dashboards.
* **Compliance—gathers compliance data automatically to produce meaningful reports according to security governance and auditing procedures for industry standards.
* **Threat hunting—allows SOC staff to use SIEM data and uncover vulnerabilities and threats by running various queries.
* **Automation and integration—allows SOC staff to determine and execute automated workflow and playbooks in response to certain incidents and integrate with other security tools via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). 
* **Threat intelligence —incorporates intelligence feeds that contain actionable data on vulnerabilities, threat actors and attack patterns with internal information.
* **Improve Incident Response (IR)—delivers case management and allows SOC teams to collaborate and share security incident knowledge to quickly synchronize critical information and respond to threats efficiently.

For a comprehensive guide on how SIEM works and how it benefits the SOC, read this [SIEM guide](https://www.exabeam.com/siem-guide/).

## How to Successfully Deploy SIEM In Four Steps
Four phases of successful SIEM deployment plan:

**Phase #1: Discovering and planning**
Start by reviewing the status of your organizational security to evaluate the most critical fronts your SIEM should be implemented. You should also determine what is crucial and necessary in terms of mandatory compliance, policies and best practices to ensure environmental security while taking into account the organizational policy. 

Since SIEM often discovers new security vulnerabilities, you should prioritize smaller subsets of the current policies and devices where the SIEM can be integrated and gather data to determine how to modify the system and apply the solution on a larger scale.

**Phase #2: Piloting and implementation**
To determine the goals of your SIEM project and the implementation course, you need to consider two goals:

1. Demonstrating the security capabilities of SIEM that will yield the best Return Of Investment (ROI).
2.  Preparing an operational model that will be used as a baseline and a runbook.

Test what you have discovered in the discovery and planning phase in real-time to expand the list of tools and incorporate them into other technologies. When you reach satisfactory results, use the information to further develop the system in the next phases.

**Phase #3: Controlled deployment**
The focus of this phase is to allow the organization to orchestrate full deployment by deploying a workflow with detailed approaches. This phase is also a useful test run of the initial production and the completed operational runbooks required for full deployment management.

**Phase #4: Continuous Growth**
A never-ending phase to ensure that the system keeps on improving over-time. You should always roll out new updates and expand deployment of your SIEM system to gather more actionable intel and incorporate new practices to improve your security and meet current policies. 

## Six Best Practices for Successful SIEM Implementation
The efficiency of your SIEM solution depends on how you implement it. Incorporate these practices for a more secure organizational environment:

**#1. Planning implementation**
First of all, you need to determine what services and security features you are looking for in a SIEM solution. Based on these requirements, you need to use policy-based rules to define which logs and activities your SIEM should monitor and use compare this policy against external compliance requirements to determine your needs. 

**#2. Conducting test runs**
Test running various scenarios, such as simulating an attack on the network, can help you assess the reaction and value of your SIEM. For example, you can check how quickly the software detected the threat and how long it took to send alerts to relevant team members. repeating this process multiple times and simulating various scenarios can help you tweak and fine-tune your SIEM.

**#3. Tuning correlation rules**
SIEM relies on information to be efficient. By applying [correlation rules](https://www.solarwindsmsp.com/blog/siem-correlation-rules), it can detect events and threats that would be more difficult to identify in isolation. While most SIEM software already comes with pre-defined correlation rules, tweaking the correlation rules to best suit your needs is ensures it fits your needs.

**#4. Identify compliance requirements**
SIEM software can help organizations meet compliance requirements and regulations. However, these requirements can often overlap. To avoid this scenario, you can draft documents that specify the compliance requirements you need to meet and check that list against potential SIEM solutions to ensure they cover your needs. 

**#5. Monitor access to network fronts and critical Resources**
Some resources are more valuable than others. Ensure that your SIEM tool is monitoring the most valuable resources for your organization including suspicious user activity, systems, and unauthorized access. Additionally, make sure that your SIEM monitors and covers networks fronts that could be vulnerable to attacks such as routers, ports, wireless access and firewalls.

**#6. Prepare an Incident Response Plan (IRP)**
SIEM solutions can detect and alert on threats, but it is up to your teams to respond and mitigate these threats. The moments after a threat has been detected are the most critical and can prevent incidents from escalating. Planning an efficient [incident response plan](https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/security/incident-response-plan.html) can help your security teams reduce stress and confusion in these crucial moments and provide a more focused and efficient mitigation effort. 

## Wrap Up
With the vast quantity and variety of security data that needs to be collected, it has become practically impossible for security teams to manage alerts and threat intelligence manually. While SIEM is an important tool for processing all this information, you need to implement a number of practices and take advantage of additional tools in order to make the most of it.The steps detailed in this guide should help you ensure a successful SIEM implementation in your organization.