Highlights
New intelligent automation capabilities, whether integrated directly into newer SIEM solutions or augmenting the existing ones with new functions, ensure that security monitoring, forensic analysis, and incident response remain a core component of any modern cybersecurity architecture, supported by a new generation of SIEM solutions.
Despite their checkered history, SIEM tools remain as relevant today as they have ever been because they perform the essential function of providing centralized collection and management of security information across all corporate IT systems.
- SIEM solutions have dominated the enterprise security market for nearly two decades, but due to high operating costs, an increasing shortage of skilled security experts, and the rapid pace of change in the business IT and cyber threat environments, traditional SIEMs are no longer effective.
- Legacy SIEM tools typically cannot deal with the volume of security alerts generated across an expanding attack surface, they cannot prioritize alerts for investigation, and they lack automation capabilities and two-way integration with security tools to support forensic investigations.
- The SIEM market is experiencing pressure from alternative approaches such as specialized security monitoring solutions and unified XDR solutions, but SIEM solutions continue to evolve and address historical challenges.
- The evolution of SIEM solutions has been facilitated mainly by the emergence of technologies like data analytics, ML, and cloud-based services, which, together with threat hunting and remediation capabilities have ensured the significant improvement of SIEM tools.
- Incorporation of advanced security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) capabilities either directly or via two-way API integrations ensures that forensic analysis and incident response can be automated to a high degree, reducing the time needed to respond to a breach.
- Modern SIEM tools continue to evolve, with solutions gaining new capabilities, merging previously standalone tools such as behavior analytics and SOAR into integrated platforms, and updating licensing policies to provide modern, scalable, and I-SIEM platforms.
- The most innovative solutions offer fully integrated unified platforms, fast hot and cold search, and fully federated search capabilities.
- Future innovation will be focused on faster and easier search capabilities, interactive chatbot/assistants, and greater automation and collaboration capabilities.
- Search functionality using natural language processing (NLP) and digital assistants based on generative AI are likely to become standard in the next 12 to 18 months.