Why SIEM Alone Isn’t Enough

Many organizations have deployed Security Information & Event Monitoring systems to enable them to detect and make sense of cybersecurity attacks either from external or internal sources across their networks, users and thousands of applications. SIEM looks for patterns which will help security teams identify technical issues, security breaches, and attacks more easily.

But these same organizations are not improving their security postures. So why are SIEM systems failing them? With cybersecurity data volumes rising exponentially, organizations are drowning in a sea of event log file data. They are still unable make sense of the data and make real-time decisions to maintain the security of their networks, devices and applications. SIEM systems aren’t very effective beyond aggregation of event log files from perimeter systems or applications.

Understanding what’s happening at the business process or transaction level requires more than just log file event correlation. It requires context. You have to make sense of what is happening within applications in a transactional context and take into account specific conditions, variables, events and specific users in order to provide the context for a leading indicator of risk to the business in a timeframe where risk can be prevented or mitigated.

Monitoring the security within an application to detect and even prevent risks requires a contextual understanding of application processes, transactions and user behaviors.

For the CISO & CIO, this means smarter analysis based on real-time rule monitoring, which can be easily defined based on compliance requirements, industry mandates and unacceptable financial risks or negative business outcomes. This next evolution in cybersecurity event monitoring will be the implementation of big data security analytics, leveraging big data analysis methodologies with a level of knowledge into what is happening within the application to solve security challenges, in order to reduce false positive alerts and enable the business to mitigate or remediate issues within a critical timeframe.

Pathlock Technologies provides a market leading approach to cybersecurity that works with SIEM products to overcome the challenges of gaining context – correlation and normalization of transactional & process data across application silos (general ledger, ERP, procurement, T&E payment, order entry, CRM and HR systems) to provide integrated, actionable intelligence in terms the business can understand and act on.