Many organizations need to meet various compliance standards, and investing in a security information and event management (SIEM) solution can often help them reach that goal. But it worth the cost and effort to deploy a SIEM solution solely for compliance? Or is there a way to maximize the value of your SIEM by strengthening cybersecurity as well as achieving compliance?
This article will help you answer those critical questions.
What are SIEM solutions?
SIEM solutions are designed to aggregate and analyze event log data from multiple applications, systems, network devices and servers to spot suspicious events that put security or business continuity at risk. By combining the capabilities of security event correlation (SEC), security event management (SEM) and security information management (SIM), SIEM software provide real-time as well as historical analysis of security events. They can help with incident investigation and compliance reporting since they thoroughly analyze contextual, historical and event data from multiple sources across the IT infrastructure.
Indeed, modern SIEMs are far more advanced than early systems that merely gathered and logged data from different sources. Now, SIEM software can deliver comprehensive insight into network security and data protection by looking for anomalous activity in your IT network that could indicate compliance, performance and security issues. By aggregating and analyzing detailed logs of events, a SIEM can give you real-time insight into potential security threats.
How SIEMs help with compliance
SIEM solutions can help organizations comply with industry and government regulations. In particular, with a SIEM, compliance requirements related to cybersecurity, data security and privacy, and breach reporting can be much easier for organizations to meet.
General advantages of SIEMs for compliance
SIEM solutions offer several key benefits that apply regardless of which regulatory compliance frameworks or mandates your organization must comply with:
- Simplified compliance reporting — SIEM software streamlines the processes of logging security data and reporting on compliance. You don’t have to gather data from each host in your IT network and compile them into reports manually; instead, the SIEM system automatically standardizes and correlates log data from across the IT environment into reports that provide details on your organization’s compliance As a result, SIEM compliance reporting saves you valuable time and makes it easier to pass compliance audits.
- Built-in support for common compliance mandates — SIEM tools often include capabilities designed to help you implement controls that meet the specific requirements of standards such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), as detailed in the next section.
How a SIEM can help with specific compliance requirements
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework
The NIST cybersecurity framework provides recommended security controls for federal agencies in the United States. However, many other organizations have adopted NIST because following its recommendations helps them comply with other regulations, such as SOX, PCI DSS and HIPAA.
That’s how SIEM solutions can help you meet NIST’s core functionalities:
- Protect — SIEMs collect logs from numerous access control systems and generate audit reports based on them.
- Detect — SIEMs monitor the IT environment for anomalous activity.
- Respond — SIEMs alert security teams about suspicious security events and provide reports that facilitate forensic analysis and response.
- Recover — SIEM reports provide information that helps organizations recover from incidents, including details about what data and systems might have been affected.
Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA)
FISMA is a set of compliance regulations that require federal agencies to implement an information security program to secure sensitive data and information technology systems that support the agency’s operations and assets, including those provided or managed by another agency, third-party vendor or service provider.
A SIEM can help you meet FISMA requirements for security controls by:
- Facilitating risk assessment by identifying potential cyber threats, vulnerabilities, exploits and so on
- Continuously monitoring system changes and updates
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
PCI DSS is a security standard for companies that handle branded credit cards. It is administered by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council.
PCI DSS includes 12 requirements, all of which require technical measures for log tracking. In particular, requirement 10 of PCI DSS calls for adopting a well-defined log tracking technology.
A SIEM solution can help you to comply with PCI DSS requirements by:
- Making it easier to review logs
- Monitoring user behavior
- Detecting anomalous activity
- Notifying security teams about threats
- Ensuring data integrity
- Saving log data for forensic investigations
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
The GDPR is a European Union (EU) regulation that governs how personal data is to be collected, kept, processed and deleted. This data security and privacy regulation applies to all organizations, regardless of location, that collect personal data from EU residents.
SIEM tools can help you achieve GDPR compliance by:
- Maintaining a record of activities
- Documenting what data has been processed and which parties it was shared with
- Safeguarding sensitive data by monitoring user behavior and detecting suspicious activity
Health Insurance and Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA)
HIPAA is designed to protect the confidentiality and privacy of medical records and other protected health information (PHI). Any organization that stores or electronically transmits healthcare information — such as pharmacies, nursing homes and psychologists — must comply with HIPAA standards and requirements.
SIEM security solutions can help you follow HIPAA standards by:
- Identifying cyberattacks that could expose PHI
- Providing log management to help ensure the integrity, availability and confidentiality of PHI
- Monitoring systems that store PHI to spot attempts at impermissible disclosure or use
Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX)
SOX is important if your company is publicly traded. Established in 2002, this standard aims to protect investors by making corporate disclosures more accurate.
A SIEM platform can help you comply with SOX by:
- Detecting unauthorized attempts to access sensitive personal information
- Spotting security events on networks and devices used to process financial data
Family Educational and Rights Privacy Act (FERPA)
FERPA protects the privacy of student records, which includes educational information, personally identifiable information (PII) and directory information.
A SIEM tool can help you meet FERPA’s requirements by:
- Detecting cyber threats that might compromise or expose PII
- Monitoring systems for unauthorized disclosure and use of PII
To SIEM or not to SIEM for compliance?
SIEM software solutions provide important functionality that can help you comply with regulatory mandates, including collection and storage of system logs, real-time event monitoring, threat detection, and alerting and reporting for incident response and investigation.
Although SIEMs do help organizations achieve and prove compliance with regulatory mandates, they have multiple drawbacks, including the following:
- Expensive and hard to deploy — SIEM software is generally expensive and has a long time to value. In fact, deployment often takes 6–12 months, and more complicated SIEMs take even longer. As a result, stalled and unsuccessful SIEM implementation projects are common, so you may find it hard to get a solid return on your investment.
- Requires regular monitoring and maintenance — Even if you succeed in deploying your SIEM, the job is still far from done. You’ll have to keep monitoring and adjusting it to keep up with changes in your IT infrastructure, the changing threat landscape, and new security policies, procedures and practices that emerge over time. According to one study, if a SIEM costs $1 million to purchase, operating expenses might easily reach $3–4 million annually, which makes these solutions unaffordable for all but the largest businesses.
- Requires hiring SIEM professionals — Getting a SIEM to work properly and keeping it working properly requires skilled services. Therefore, organizations must either invest extensively in training for their IT employees or hire experienced SIEM specialists, who are difficult to find and incredibly costly.
- Alert fatigue — Perhaps the most important drawback of SIEMs is that they generate a high number of false positive alarms. Response teams are often overwhelmed trying to triage and investigate SIEM alerts, which can lead to true security incidents being missed in all the noise.
Summing up, adopting a SIEM solution just for compliance is often not a sound strategy. SIEMs are notoriously expensive and complicated to deploy and maintain, and they flood security teams with so many alerts that true threats are likely to be overlooked.
How Netwrix can help
Netwrix solutions can help you improve security, data privacy and compliance while avoiding SIEM-related headaches. They provide solid data and application security on their own — and also integrate with SIEM tools to dramatically improve threat detection and response. In particular, SIEM solutions collect and report events as they appear in logs, so the output data is often cryptic and is missing critical details. Netwrix Auditor enriches the output with critical details and ensures it is easy to understand.
Netwrix offers prebuilt generic add-ons that facilitate integration with any SIEM solution that supports input data in .CEF format and in event log format. There are also add-ons specifically designed for the following SIEMs:
Read this eBook for further help in determining whether a SIEM is the best answer to your IT security challenges and more details about how the Netwrix data security platform will help you build a comprehensive security strategy.
FAQ
- What are the disadvantages of SIEM solutions?
A SIEM is not always the best solution for security and compliance for several reasons:
- High price — SIEMs are notoriously expensive to purchase, configure and maintain.
- Long time to value — Deployment can take a year or even longer.
- Alert fatigue — SIEM solutions often generate a flood of false positive alerts that swamp security teams, leaving true threats buried in all the noise.
- Are SIEM solutions hard to implement?
Yes. Unlike some other solutions, SIEM tools don’t work right out of the box. They require your IT team to spend a lot of time and energy on customization and maintenance.
- How does a SIEM help with compliance?
SIEMs help organizations ensure compliance by aggregating and safeguarding log data and automating the creation of reports aligned with GDPR, FERPA and other compliance mandates.