Page 255 - Cyber Defense eMagazine August 2024

How to choose the SIEM system, which really suits your organization’s needs

Despite there are numerous SIEM systems available on the market, their functionality varies significantly.
When choosing the solution, it’s crucial to examine the conditions of implementation, usage and tasks,
which the SIEM system is capable solving.

Which aspects are recommended to consider:

1. Speed of implementation and functionality, available “out-of-the-box”

14% of respondents, who took part in the survey by SearchInform stated potential labor costs for
implementation, configuration and customization of a SIEM system as the prerequisites, why their
companies didn’t purchase a SIEM. However, there are solutions, which work out-of-the-box and don’t
require serious labor costs. The system should be deployed quickly, don’t interrupt business processes
or cause conflicts with IT infrastructure. Immediately upon the deployment SIEM should efficiently reveal
software&hardware failures, targeted attacks, potentially dangerous users’ actions.

2. Simplicity of administration

Most part of respondents claim that it’s a very complicated task for them to work with the SIEM system.
That’s why when choosing protective solution companies should assess the system’s usability: IS and IT
specialists with almost any experience should be able to work with the system. For example, to configure
correlation rules in some SIEM class solutions, it’s required to have some programming skills. In
SearchInform SIEM this task was eased as much as possible: such rules can be configured in just a few
clicks.

3. Cost of SIEM system ownership and licensing model
SIEM system should offer the transparent system of licensing to make sure that customers can optimize
budgets, allocated on protection of infrastructure. For example, if SIEM system licensing system is based
on the number of hosts, customer will initially understand how much the deployment will cost.

It’s also important to understand that implementation of SIEM system can be accompanied with some
other ongoing expenditures, thus, it’s also required to pay attention to the hardware requirements. In case
the requirements are high, the server, for example, will be expensive and not any SME will be capable of
purchasing such system.

Why SIEM system is important for ensuring protection of small companies

Cyber threat landscapes evolve permanently and new risks occur regularly. These risks should be
detected just in time. Detection of security events and timely response to them will reduce the threats,
related to cyber attacks in small companies.

SIEM systems enable to combine functionality of a few tools: accumulate details on security events,
ensure monitoring of infrastructure hardware, reveal incident in the link of events and notify IS officer.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – August 2024 Edition 255
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