Major Use Cases and Capabilities
Major Use Cases
Advanced threat detection and response
Intelligent SIEM solutions use advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI-driven capabilities to detect sophisticated and evolving threats in real time or near real time without relying on predefined rules and policies. They correlate and analyze security event data from multiple sources to identify real indicators of compromise (IoCs), abnormal behavior, and potential security incidents, enabling proactive threat hunting and rapid response to mitigate risks, while reducing the number of false positives.
User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)
Intelligent SIEM platforms incorporate UEBA functionality to monitor and analyze user and entity behavior across the organization's IT environment. By baselining normal behavior and detecting deviations indicative of insider threats, compromised accounts, or malicious activity, they help identify and respond to security incidents more effectively, while minimizing false positives.
Cloud security monitoring
With the increasing adoption of cloud services and infrastructure, intelligent SIEM solutions provide comprehensive visibility and monitoring capabilities across on-premises, cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments. They support the aggregation and analysis of security telemetry from cloud platforms, applications, and services, enabling organizations to detect and respond to cloud-based threats and compliance violations.
Automation and orchestration
Intelligent SIEM solutions either include security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) capabilities or integrate with SOAR platforms to automate repetitive tasks, streamline incident response workflows, and orchestrate response actions across security tools and systems. By automating routine security operations and response processes, I-SIEMs enhance operational efficiency, reduce manual effort, and accelerate incident response times.
Compliance management and reporting
Intelligent SIEM platforms help organizations meet regulatory compliance requirements and industry standards by providing centralized compliance monitoring, reporting, and auditing capabilities. They assist in collecting and correlating security event data, generating compliance reports, and demonstrating adherence to regulatory mandates such as GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and ISO 27001.
Capabilities
Data Collection
The collection and efficient storage of security events from various sources is the original and primary goal of SIEM solutions. This includes parsing system, application, service, or device logs in various formats; capturing and analyzing network traffic information; collecting security data directly from endpoints using agent-based or agentless methods; and integrating with cloud services and other third-party sources.
Correlation and Enrichment
This involves identifying relationships between data from various sources in real time using statistical algorithms and machine learning methods, adding business context information collected from other enterprise IT systems, and incorporating threat intelligence from external feeds.
Threat Detection
This evaluates the ability to detect patterns and anomalies in security data beyond the traditional rule-based approach. I-SIEM solutions to be able to remove the statistical noise and reduce false positives without human intervention, by relying on techniques like behavior analysis and/or machine learning. Leading solution can identify security incidents across multiple events and assign risk scores according to threat models.
Forensic Investigation
This refers to the provision of on-demand access to all source and contextual security information relevant for an incident investigation or proactive threat hunting; the ability to pivot to related events or entities; and automated forensic analysis supported with workflows, policies, and risk models tailored to specific industries or markets.
Incident Response
This refers to built-in or closely integrated capabilities to initiate and orchestrate incident response processes. Leading I-SIEM solutions integrate with specialized SOAR solutions and/or include these capabilities directly or through partnerships with third-party vendors.
Intelligence and automation
The primary advantage of next-generation I-SIEM platforms over traditional rule-based solutions is their ability to address analyst fatigue and the skills shortage through the high degree of intelligent automation. They should not require a team of trained security experts to operate, relying instead on actionable alerts and automated workflows, and ideally providing a complete end-to-end solution for a security operations center.
Compliance
Addressing regulatory compliance requirements is one of the primary use cases for modern SIEM solutions. Long-term security data retention, normalization, and correlation across multiple IT systems, and rich visualization and reporting capabilities, make SIEMs ideal tools for compliance audit and reporting.
Cloud Support
This concerns the degree to which solutions support the collection of logs from cloud services and applications, including shadow IT. It also considers the number of out-of-the-box integrations and connectors that are provided for cloud services and applications. Most organizations are migrating to cloud services. It is therefore important that next-gen I-SIEMs provide good support for cloud computing.