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Goodbye Lonely SIEM, Hello MDR

  • When updating your systems from a pure Security Information Event Management (SIEM), choosing the right Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service is key.
  • An MDR service needn’t mean you have to discard your current SIEM. They can coexist. MDR can update and enhance the SIEM, which is a boon for security teams.
  • The right MDR service learns and adapts to customers’ needs while offering significant savings.

The State of SIEM

Security Information Event Management (SIEM) has been a necessary part of cybersecurity for two decades, but it is no longer sufficient. Cyber threats are growing in both volume and sophistication, which demands an urgent solution.

Managing information by way of security alerts is part of a security team’s remit, but a focus on threat detection and response is paramount in today’s threat landscape. The right Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service is a sophisticated, effective, and customizable solution.

SIEM systems have long been crucial components of effective security, but new possibilities (and dangers) emerge as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) become more pervasive. Before adopting MDR, many of our customers were bombarded with threats and high rates of false positives — too many for a single human (or even a team) to pore over.

Your Money or Your Storage

It’s safe to say that most organizations are driven by budgetary concerns. There is a clear disparity between the cost of SIEMs and the cost of storing data, which SIEM vendors have been taking advantage of for too long – happy to charge clients an arm and a leg for storage fees.

As a result, security teams are unwilling to feed data into their SIEMs due to the fear of storage costs skyrocketing, which leaves data in “dumb storage.” Even telltale signs of attack are sometimes neglected or overlooked because it is simply too expensive to process, analyze, and extract threat intelligence from the multitudes of data.

A tiny fraction of security teams has dedicated threat hunters who can help detect threats that SIEMs collect, but often “miss” due to lack of contextualization and analysis. Threat hunting exercises can be very expensive though, especially if done on a weekly basis. The choice for security teams seems to be between compromising on either security or cost.

Every customer with a SIEM has told us that they have encountered the need to identify the real threats that their SIEM alone cannot respond to. But most don’t have the resources to devote a full-time threat hunter to this challenge.

There are five easy steps to replace your SIEM — or use what works alongside it to enhance your organization’s threat protection.
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Extend Your Detection and Response

In corporations of 50,000+ people, a security team might be 200+ strong. But for every large company, there are perhaps 20 other companies with security teams of 10 or fewer people. They may not even have dedicated security analysts. Meanwhile, the security engineers they do have use a stack of 20 or more products.

Companies with fewer than 2,500 people usually lack sufficient human resources and expertise to meet today’s security challenges. Unlike big corporations with multimillion-dollar cybersecurity budgets, small businesses can’t look at every possible alert. This lack of resources hampers management, reaction to, and escalation of threats following detection.

More importantly, when SIEMs are involved, the technology is already at a disadvantage because SIEMs were never intended to conduct the “response” part of “detection and response.” To be effective, alert triage requires interplay between both.

This is where choosing the right MDR service becomes essential. The right MDR service effectively augments the capabilities of any security team with that of a highly experienced SOC. For the price of a SIEM, MDR customers can get a full security system that’s operational in less than 30 days, as opposed to SIEMs, which can sometimes take up to a year to deploy and put into production.

Automating Security Operations

If you already have a SIEM and want to hold onto it, you can complement it with an AI and automation driven MDR service that coexists alongside your current system.

The weakness of SIEM technology is a lack of learning, integration, and effective response. But automating security operations solves this problem head on, with flexibility. Security analysts are no longer overburdened by tedious and repetitive tasks. Instead, they can focus on the issues that need their unique human reasoning while the machines process the massive amounts of data to conduct automated detection and response.

Certain aspects of security cannot — and probably should not — be automated. But many, many tasks are best done with AI and machine learning (ML) working in concert with human intelligence.

At LogicHub, we believe that if you must do something more than twice, it can and should be automated. Humans still play a role in security, but the millions of events generated by multiple data sources can be analyzed by machines at machine speed and machine scale. The key is using AI that progressively learns from ongoing feedback – not a simple rules-based model that a SIEM uses.

The net effect is significant cost reduction from a purely SIEM-based security team. Adopting a more modern machine/human security posture enables security analysts to tackle the most advanced and relevant 10 to 20 percent of security challenges, while intelligent automation manages the bulk of the load.

Fully Customizable MDR

At LogicHub, we do not replace human decision-making with machines. Instead, we have our own experts encode their years’ worth of experience and techniques into the program, which progressively learns and gets “smarter.” The results are a fully customizable MDR service built on a decision engine that learns from humans and improves with time, and one that is specifically tailored to your needs.

Don’t compromise on cost or effectiveness in dealing with security threats. Your business literally depends on it.

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LogicHub harnesses the power of AI and automation for superior detection and response at a fraction of the cost. From small teams with security challenges, to large teams automating SOCs, LogicHub makes advanced detection and response easy and effective for everyone.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blog | LogicHub® authored by Willy Leichter. Read the original post at: https://www.logichub.com/blog/goodbye-lonely-siem-hello-mdr