Five Reasons Why Your Organization Needs a Managed SIEM Solution 

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): A Quick History 

Back in 2005, the first generation of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms was a pretty big deal. These platforms combined security event management with security information for the first time, bringing the data security industry into a new era. (cybersecurity-magazine.com) 

Presently, SIEM systems are often utilized by heavily regulated industries with several compliance directives. Even if a SIEM is required for regulatory purposes, it may not be functioning at its full operating potential and could be challenging for an organization to optimize and maintain.   

Across industries, there may even be a feeling that a SIEM isn’t actually necessary if your industry isn’t highly regulated. 

But currently, SIEM platforms are focused on a more risk-based approach, with valuable alerts often available through a consolidated view. According to TechTarget.com, “SIEM makes it easier for enterprises to manage security by filtering massive amounts of security data and prioritizing security alerts the software generates. SIEM software enables organizations to detect incidents that may otherwise go undetected.” 

Basically, having a SIEM is a really good thing. But optimizing your SIEM is key to seeing the value of your investment. Eighty-eight percent of organizations may have challenges with their current SIEM platform (2020 State of SecOps Report), but yours doesn’t have to be one of them. 

Turning to Managed SIEM to Solve SIEM Challenges 

You may have a SIEM, but are struggling with the deployment, maintenance, and staffing of the application. At this point, you may be wondering if the investment is even worth it, or how you can make your SIEM solution work better for your organization. With Critical Start’s Managed SIEM, we take responsibility for the back-end components of your SIEM solution, relieving you of the headaches around maintaining your application. 

If you’re curious about how a Managed SIEM approach could better help the security and productivity of your organization, consider these five challenges around managing your own SIEM: 

1. The Cost: A Managed SIEM can help your staff be more efficient, directly affecting operating costs. Your staff can be freed to look at high priority security issues, since the administrative tasks are outsourced, resulting in both direct and indirect cost benefits. For example, if you hire an experienced worker for $X an hour, but they’re bogged down by administrative tasks, then you’re not getting their value. Instead, you can pay them for the highly developed skills you hired them for. Managed SIEM also reduces your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by decreasing your in-house requirements, while enhancing your detection coverage and compliance posture. 

2. Tackling the Workforce Gap and Staffing Shortage: If you do have an in-house SOC or analysts, you’re finding that they may be spending a lot of time on tasks that could be automated. With Critical Start’s services, you outsource the Tier 1 and Tier 2 Security Operations Center (SOC) responsibility for triage, letting your team focus on what matters most. And if you outsource Managed SIEM as well, then you can augment these time and cost savings even further by having a dedicated expert focused on fine-tuning, optimizing your SIEM, and notifying you when the vendor releases updates. 

3. The Amount of Time Spent: A Managed SIEM can improve team productivity through better allocation of in-house responsibilities. Critical Start offers custom development for dashboards, reports, and logs to support your security, risk, compliance, and audit use cases. We take on the manual stuff, so you don’t have to. 

4. Struggling to Keep your SIEM Updated: Embracing Managed SIEM can increase your ability to keep up with emerging threats and compliance requirements, while continuously monitoring your SIEM for updates to make sure it’s running at an optimal capacity. We offer a quarterly service review, which includes an ingest cost analysis for Microsoft Sentinel™ to analyze billing verses ingest for specific Microsoft data sources based on your security products and licenses. 

5. Security Gaps in Coverage: If a trusted, dedicated third party constantly maintains and optimizes your SIEM, you’re ensuring that you are minimizing or eradicating any potential security gaps. Respond to any alerts quickly and effectively, powered by the Zero Trust Analytics Platform™ (ZTAP®), 24x7x365 expert security analysts and the Critical Start Cyber Research Unit (CRU). 
    

To learn more about how our Managed SIEM offerings could be right for your team, contact an expert today. We also have an on-demand webinar that explains why you deserve to have an optimized SIEM (and how to do it) that you can watch on-demand here. 

Critical Start simplifies breach prevention and helps stop business disruptions. Through Managed SIEM, we also manage costs and reduce threat coverage gaps to help you go above and beyond any industry requirements.