According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022, 83% of organisations have experienced more than one data breach. Combined with the increasing complexity and frequency of cyber-attacks, especially those targeting enterprise-level organisations, there needs to be a higher uptake of cyber security solutions that can quickly and accurately detect threats.
One of the key ways of achieving this is by implementing a security information & event management solution (SIEM), but we often get asked whether a log management system can achieve the same results.
In this article, we are going to explore the differences between a SIEM and a log management system and identify why it’s so important that your organisation utilises the capabilities they provide.
What is a SIEM?
A security information and event management (SIEM) solution, collects and analyses data from a wide variety of different sources. Microsoft Sentinel is an example of a SIEM solution, offering some of the most powerful capabilities of any SIEM solution on the market today.
A SIEM collects data from endpoints, networks, applications, cloud-based solutions, and much more. Microsoft Sentinel, for example, can collect and analyse data from anywhere on your network, ensuring that you have total visibility of your infrastructure.
After it has the data, the SIEM generates alerts if it notices anything suspicious during the analysis process. This is then flagged up for your SOC team to review further. These alerts can include failed login attempts, network access errors, geographic anomalies, and much, much more.
This enables faster and more effective threat detection and response.
What is a log management system?
A log management system collects and stores logs from a variety of sources in a centralised location. Analysts can then view this data for investigative purposes to assess whether an incident may have originated or been affected by a certain source.
Similar to a SIEM, a log management system draws data from almost any location across a network infrastructure, depending on the solution being used. It typically offers data collection and retention, indexing and searching, reporting, and robust storage capabilities.
Unfortunately, it isn’t able to offer the analysis, alert management, and incident response capabilities that a SIEM provides, making it more of a reactive and investigative tool, rather than a proactive one.
SIEM vs Log Management
SIEM and log management systems have a lot in common, as well as a lot of differences. It’s important to be aware of how they differ so you can make the right decision on which is the correct solution for your cyber security requirements.
Commonalities:
- Both allow real-time collection, storage, and search capabilities of log data.
- Both collect data from a wide variety of sources, including endpoints, network devices, systems, and applications.
- Both provide reporting capabilities regarding operational and system performance.
- Both solutions require a team of experts to manage and operate them, as well as utilise them to their proper potential.
- Both need to be frequently calibrated, assessed, and configured to ensure they are operating effectively and efficiently.
- Unlike a SIEM, log management provides no automated alert analysis. Instead, it is up to an analyst to interpret the data manually, which can be a time-consuming and difficult process.
- A SIEM combines collected log data with more contextual information, such as specific assets, device information, threats, vulnerabilities, and more. Combined with its machine learning and AI capabilities, it can automatically generate alerts based on data, whereas log management cannot.
- SIEM solutions make the threat detection and response process much more efficient and accurate. They also greatly reduce the workload requirement of SOC analysts by automating alert generation.
- Log management solutions don’t convert log data into a unified format. This can lead to variability in the collected data, making the analyst’s job much harder. SIEM solutions instead take all of the collected data and convert it into a uniform format, homogenising the data and making it easier to organise and analyse.
How can a SIEM benefit your business?
At this point, we’ve discussed the differences between a SIEM and a log management system, but we haven’t talked about which one you should opt for.
Whilst log management systems have their time and place, it’s exceedingly rare that an enterprise will choose one over a SIEM solution. SIEMs offer much more functionality and deeper capabilities, as well as actively improve an organisation’s cyber security posture. We would always advise that our customers choose a SIEM, such as Microsoft Sentinel.
SIEMs offer complete visibility of your network infrastructure and, when combined with other cyber security tools, form a core part of the SOC Visibility Triad.
They also improve threat detection and response, reduce SOC team workload, automate alert generation, provide loads of valuable tools and data to threat investigators and researchers, and reliably lower the chance of being affected by a cyber threat or experiencing a data breach.
Are you looking to improve your existing SIEM solution or are you only just starting your SIEM journey? Do you want to improve your incident detection and response capabilities whilst also gaining complete network visibility? Get in touch with Wizard Cyber today. Our cyber security experts will be happy to walk you through our managed SIEM services and answer any questions you might have.
