Traditional SIEM vs. Next-Gen SIEM
SIEM tools revolutionized the world of computing in 2005 when facilitating IT professionals work in businesses’ systems security management. In the beginning, the traditional SIEM solutions were designed for centralized log management, collecting and aggregating logs data from different sources in a secure, separate location. As a result, logs remain intact in a compromise or hardware failure, helping organizations track and monitor suspicious activities that indicate cyber threats. However, traditional SIEM doesn’t have the automated capabilities for real-time threats detection and incident response that a Next-Gen SIEM/Next-Generation SIEM platform gives.
- Security Alert Noises
When implementing traditional SIEM, IT teams are inundated with many security alerts noises challenging to handle every day. As a result, many teams tend to classify the alerts as false positive for dealing with alert fatigue. However, security analysts lose the critical alerts that indicate threats and organizations get compromised. The first SIEM generation required expert data analysis and a skilled team able to filter out the growing avalanche of false positives to discover the real security threats.
Using a Next-Gen SIEM platform solves this issue through filters that standardize log fields and an AI-powered event correlation engine based on several correlations rules. In this way, cybersecurity experts only receive critical alerts broken down by IP source and destination details, which facilitates forensic analysis and threat detection.
- Threat Detection
Threat detection is conformed by threat intelligence, cyber threat hunting, and anomaly detection techniques. Anomaly detection helps to identify events, behavior, and patterns to be unusual or suspicious that can become threats to organizations. Unlike traditional SIEM, a Next-Gen SIEM includes this threat detection capability that allows organizations to identify and predict threats and attacks attempts.
The Next-Gen SIEM’s machine learning anomaly-based engine analyzes the environment and defines custom rules and baselines. This learning mechanism allows the system to learn from the environment and gain the ability to identify abnormal and threatening behavior.
- Incident Response
The incident response team addresses and manages the security breaches of organizations. Usually, Next-Gen SIEM platforms providers handle the security incident process through a customized incident response plan according to the client’s needs. Currently, Next-Gen SIEM includes functionality from Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) for faster threat detection and response.
- Customized Dashboards and Reporting
Commonly, traditional SIEM solutions come with a fixed set of pre-created dashboards and reports to fit most clients’ most common compliance needs. However, not all environments are the same, and every organization has unique use cases that need customs dashboards and reports. Once again, Next-Gen SIEM came to solve this capacity.
- Compliance
Organizations that want to implement the best cybersecurity practices must include a SIEM that handles compliance. Unfortunately, traditional SIEM and compliance are not integrated. However, the Next-Generation SIEM manages FISMA, HIPAA, GLBA, GDPR, SOX, PCI DSS, CMMC, and other standards compliance.
- Cloud-based SIEM
With increasingly cloud-based infrastructures, new service-oriented architectures, Internet and user traffic at unparalleled levels, a traditional SIEM cannot effectively monitor and protect against modern security threats.
A cloud-based Next-Gen SIEM offers the fastest distribution of threat intelligence. It also includes the server time needed to process large volumes of log data. With a cloud-based SIEM, all users, applications, devices, servers, and other endpoints can be monitored and managed effectively and efficiently.
Conclusion
A traditional SIEM, at its time, provided security to simple IT environments. However, with the new advances in technological ecosystems, organizations need advanced tools to comply with the best cybersecurity practices and effectively manage and monitor all vulnerabilities. Today, the Next-Gen SIEM platform is the most advanced solution to protect organizations from proactively way against sophisticated threats and all types of cyber-attacks.
