Today, organizations have a lot of their systems on-premises, on cloud, or (a mix of both) in hybrid environments. With continuously growing environments, third-party solutions, and different resource types, it is crucial that these organizations gain control of their entire infrastructure through a single dashboard that can showcase all security incidents, thereby providing more value to the Security Operations Center (SOC).
This is where Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) play integral roles.
Let me illustrate how.
Overseeing and responding rapidly
Log collection requires one unified workspace to collect all those different metrics, costs of the log ingestion, data collection of each resource and, on top of that, have alerting systems with rapid response capabilities.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is the first part of the solution and its primary purpose is to collect and analyze different data from multiple sources. This helps detect and respond to security events related to different applications and systems that are being monitored in real time.
Third-party integration, such as with Fortinet, Crowdstrike, and Barracuda, comes organically, allowing seamless communication between different security solutions used by an organization.
A centralized workspace is highly scalable with no limited amount of data ingested across the system, which helps organizations keep track of everything far easier.The second part of this solution is Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), which helps extend those capabilities by providing ways to automate, orchestrate, and respond to incidents. It does this by reducing response time and workloads for SOC teams so that they can get more work done quickly and efficiently.
All the automation capabilities are based on different steps, predefined actions, and workflows as a response mechanism to reduce manual intervention and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Challenges faced in adopting SIEM and SOAR
Challenges come in different ways – diversity of resources, volume of the collected data, decision making and action undertaking.
Here are some of the leading ones:
- Multicloud and hybrid cloud asset overview: Depending on the size of the organization and its environment, and the different vendors engaged, servers can be either on cloud or remain on-premises. In either case, requirements vary from one organization to another.
- Highly scalable environments: Organizations can scale in one of two directions – vertically (increasing the capacity of one single resource) or horizontally (distributing workloads across multiple resources for more resilience and catering to workload demands like virtual machinesand Kubernetes clusters).
- Third-party solutions: Organizations using different types of vendors for different types of security can feel overwhelmed with tracking all the solutions and problems that can occur across them.
- Audit and security logs: Being compliant with different audits, changing guidelines and country-specific regulations can be a trying one, especially in the long run.
Leveraging a cutting-edge SIEM/SOAR platform
As a solution that combines the best of both worlds, Microsoft provides Sentinel — a unified service, which is highly scalable and cloud-native. This provides cyber threat detection, investigation, response, and threat-hunting with a bird’s eye perspective across all the solutions inside the organization.
This also enables automated responses to threat detections such as blocking users or isolating machines based on specific triggers and conditions. This allows for enriched investigations and accelerates details and detections with AI.
With a lot of out-of-the-box capabilities and different ways to ingest organizational data, it speeds up the security overview process and provides great visibility across the environment.
Besides the out-of-the-box content, there is a wide range of customizations ranging from log ingestion and data retention to automation that can be done on the platform itself. MS Sentinel’s functionalities provide a tailored experience to adapt to organizational needs, making it a must have.
A uniform, normalized view alongside this customizability helps SOC teams to whitelist, blacklist, and mitigate threats across the environment based on requirements. In today’s complex IT environments, SIEM and SOAR solutions are essential for effective security management. SIEM provides a centralized platform for data collection, analysis, and threat detection, while SOAR automates tasks, streamlines workflows, and accelerates incident response. Microsoft Sentinel offers a comprehensive solution that combines the best of both worlds, empowering organizations to protect their assets and mitigate risks. SIEM/SOAR provides a centralized platform for collecting, analyzing, and responding to security events from diverse sources, streamlining the management of complex security environments.
Partnering with an established expert systems integrator like Eviden allows organizations to optimize Sentinel’s cutting-edge capabilities, as well as leverage Eviden’s vast experience and rich expertise. Eviden’s Managed Security Services optimizes Sentinel for a far more robust approach to security management.
- Find out how Eviden’s Managed services offering can accelerate your cybersecurity strategy with Sentinel’s SIEM/SOAR capabilities: Managed Security Services Microsoft Sentinel – Microsoft Azure Marketplace
- Read more about Eviden, a platinum Microsoft Partner.
- Let’s connect and unlock the possibilities of SIEM/SOAR, and how Sentinel and Eviden can make these a reality.