Find out the four steps to successfully migrate to and optimise your new SIEM.
A SIEM solution plays a crucial role in the organisation’s security posture, but as technology evolves, it becomes more challenging for older SIEMs to process the millions of log entries generated every day, leading to an increased rate of false positives. Security teams then face an uphill battle as they attempt to filter through all the noise.
The ever-increasing costs of log analysis, the inability to automate mundane tasks, and the absence of advanced analytical and investigation techniques are a few reasons why organisations migrate from legacy to modern or ‘next gen’ SIEM solutions. Yet migrating from one SIEM solution to another is not a simple task. We provide a four-point plan to help you make the transition.
- Plan
For any organisation, SIEM migration is a strategic undertaking that should be driven by key objectives. For example, being able to prioritise high-risk issues that could have a substantial impact on business operations, as identified during your latest risk assessment. Ensure stakeholder buy-in to agree on these priorities. After prioritisation, you must document the problems that you are trying to solve through SIEM migration. Consider the people, processes, and technologies involved and align these with your business objectives. Identify various data sources that will feed log data to your new SIEM solution and ask your SIEM service provider about inbuilt use cases and the platform’s ability to extract data from all available sources.
- Execute
SIEM solutions depend upon log data, which is why incorrect configuration can render your SIEM solution useless.
Closely coordinate with your SIEM service provider to accurately configure data sources into your new SIEM solution. A good SIEM solution will feature inbuilt support for a wide range of log data sources and require minimal manual parsing of log data fields. The Logsign SIEM supports more than 400+ data sources to help you quickly set up your SIEM solution, and you can also request new parsers or even request customised ones to suit your requirements, all of which will be provided free of charge.
You may also need to train your SOC team on the new SIEM solution. While a new SIEM solution will increase the productivity of your team, you must ensure that the transition takes the least amount of time possible, which will largely be determined by the number of use cases and data sources.
- Assess
SIEM migration is only the beginning.
The organisation needs to ensure that the new SIEM solution is performing as expected and discovering threats and suspicious behaviour. We recommend an overlapping period between the deployment of the new SIEM and the decommissioning of the old one to allow for bedding in. During this time, you should assess the performance of the new SIEM solution and use this as your baseline measurement. This baseline depends on factors such as the fulfilment of compliance requirements, percentage of false positives, the scope of event correlation, etc.
- Review
Continuous improvement
Using machine learning algorithms and behaviour analytics will minimise the percentage of false positives. However, before signing off the SIEM migration project, you should decide on when you will schedule regular reviews. These should focus on reviewing the existing use cases and creating new use cases to match business requirements and should ideally be performed once a quarter.
At this point, it’s also a wise idea to carry out a red team exercise to check how your SIEM solution reacts. If your organisation does not have a dedicated team for red teaming, you should consider engaging an independent third party. From this point on, improving your SIEM solution with regular reviews should become a part of a continuous improvement process.
Moving to a next-gen SIEM can provide real benefits by allowing the business to capture log feeds from more data sources, carry out real-time correlation and enrichment, and automate incident response, notification and remediation. However, to get the most out of the migration, it’s important to identify your objectives, configure the solution and train teams to conduct regular reviews to continue to optimise output.
To find out how we can help your business smoothly transition to the Logsign next-gen SIEM solution, contact us for a one-to-one consultation on Logsign SIEM at info@4datasolutions.com or on 0330 128 9180.