SIEM Tools – Security Event Monitoring Software Guide | SolarWinds

What are SIEM tools?

Businesses rely on their IT infrastructures to support nearly every aspect of their operations. At the same
time, security threats ranging from cyberattacks to malicious user activity can put network security and data
integrity at risk. For comprehensive protection, businesses are turning to Security and Information Event
Management (SIEM) tools, software programs to help monitor log activity—and flag suspicious
incidents—throughout an IT environment.

SIEM is essentially a combination of two practices:

1. Security Information Management (SIM) involves collecting, normalizing, and analyzing log data
   from different sources across your network, including firewalls, servers, and anti-malware software. This data
   offers
   a real-time view of events and activity. A SIM tool may include the ability to automate responses to potential
   issues.
2. Security Event Management (SEM) involves leveraging specific types of event data for real-time
   threat analysis, visualization, and incident response. It can also include threat intelligence features to flag
   activities like suspicious authentications or logins based on up-to-date lists of known bad actors.

As a combination of these types of security tools, a SIEM tool is designed to streamline and automate key tasks
related to both SIM and SEM by delivering monitoring and collecting security log data from sources to provide an
overview of possible network threats that would be nearly impossible to detect when using separate, basic tools
or with manual efforts. However, SIEM doesn’t replace the need for other security tools but gathers
information from them in the form of log and event data to enable you to analyze and correlate data to improve
your understanding of the activities happening across systems.

When researching SIEM, you may come across information about unified security management or unified threat
management (UTM) solutions. While UTM solutions deal with original data or create data with sensors, SIEMs
aggregate and manage log data from other devices—which can include UTMs. So, while UTM tools provide some
similar capabilities as SIEMS, they can also introduce a single point of failure for your network.

The functions and power of SIEM tools can vary depending on the vendor but often share the same basic
capabilities, including log data management, compliance reporting, threat detection and intelligence, alerts,
and a dashboard to enable you to interface with multiple security protocols. While SIEM software has been used
for over a decade, new SIEM security tools are likely to incorporate more security monitoring and automation
features, like automated responses to resolve security issues when configured thresholds are met and more
sophisticated forms of security analytics to better support the ability to provide comprehensive insights into a
company’s overall security posture.