SIEM : Security information and event management (SIEM) is a term for software products and services combining security information management (SIM) and security event management
(SEM). SIEM technology provides real-time analysis of security alerts
generated by network hardware and applications. SIEM is sold as
software, appliances or managed services, and are also used to log
security data and generate reports for compliance purposes.
The acronyms SEM, SIM and SIEM have been sometimes used interchangeably.
The segment of security management that deals with real-time
monitoring, correlation of events, notifications and console views is
commonly known as security event management (SEM). The second area
provides long-term storage, analysis and reporting of log data and is
known as security information management (SIM).
As with many meanings and definitions of capabilities evolving
requirements continually shape derivatives of SIEM product categories.
The need for voice centric visibility or vSIEM (voice security
information and event management) is a recent example of this evolution.
The term security information event management (SIEM), coined by Mark Nicolett and Amrit Williams of Gartner in 2005,
describes the product capabilities of gathering, analyzing and
presenting information from network and security devices; identity and
access management applications; vulnerability management and policy compliance tools; operating system, database and application logs; and external threat
data. A key focus is to monitor and help manage user and service
privileges, directory services and other system configuration changes;
as well as providing log auditing and review and incident response.
As of February 2014, Mosaic Security Research identified 64 SIEM and log management products.
Capabilities
- Data aggregation : Log management aggregates data from many sources, including network, security, servers, databases, applications, providing the ability to consolidate monitored data to help avoid missing crucial events.
- Correlation : looks for common attributes, and links events together into meaningful bundles. This technology provides the ability to perform a variety of correlation techniques to integrate different sources, in order to turn data into useful information. Correlation is typically a function of the Security Event Management portion of a full SIEM solution.
- Alerting: the automated analysis of correlated events and production of alerts, to notify recipients of immediate issues. Alerting can be to a dashboard, or sent via third party channels such as email.
- Dashboards: Tools can take event data and turn it into informational charts to assist in seeing patterns, or identifying activity that is not forming a standard pattern.
- Compliance: Applications can be employed to automate the gathering of compliance data, producing reports that adapt to existing security, governance and auditing processes.
- Retention: employing long-term storage of historical data to facilitate correlation of data over time, and to provide the retention necessary for compliance requirements. Long term log data retention is critical in forensic investigations as it is unlikely that discovery of a network breach will be at the time of the breach occurring.
- Forensic analysis: The ability to search across logs on different nodes and time periods based on specific criteria. This mitigates having to aggregate log information in your head or having to search through thousands and thousands of logs.
