Cybersecurity is a critical function for every organization, and it’s often a challenging one. The need to minimize your organization’s exposure to the risk of a breach must be balanced with a security budget and security staff headcount that are often tightly limited.
Those decisions are often complicated by the breadth of choices— and acronyms— the security market offers. So to help you make more informed decision on this critical topic, let’s break down the differences in two particularly popular market acronyms: SIEM and SOC.
What is a Security Information and Event Management System (SIEM)?
SIEM stands for security information and event management. SIEM software collects data from across your environment — including system logs, network monitoring tools, and applications — that may be of use in detecting the kinds of anomalous activity indicative of a potential breach.
The idea of aggregating security-related data in a single repository goes back to the earliest days of network computing. However, as enterprise computing environments grew larger and more complex — and as threat actors developed more sophisticated tactics for bypassing cyberdefenses — SIEM technology had to evolve accordingly.
That’s why today’s SIEMs are vastly more advanced than their earlier counterparts. Today’s SIEMs typically include features that help cybersecurity teams more efficiently comb through the massive volumes of data they collect, and more intelligently “connect the dots” between disparate data points that may relate to each other in ways that indicate the possibility of an active attack.
Shouldn’t Everyone Have a SIEM?
The answer to this question is yes and no. Yes, every organization needs a way to aggregate and correlate all the data they can collect that might help keep them safe from a cyberattack. But there are also several reasons that more and more organizations are moving away from a traditional SIEM model:
- Cost. SIEM solutions can be very expensive. Also, SIEM vendors often charge based on data volume. This volume-based pricing adds cost based on how much telemetry data you capture and retain — so the more thorough and diligent you are about collecting data, the more you pay. Also, because you can never be sure exactly how much your environment will grow, SIEM introduces unpredictable cost variability to your cybersecurity spending. That can be a big problem for organizations working on a tight budget.
- Alert/data fatigue. While SIEM can do a great job of detecting potential security issues anywhere across your environment, it often overdoes it, generating lots of alerts that turn out to be false positives and overwhelming cybersecurity staff with data that is mostly noise instead of signal. If, like most organizations, your cybersecurity staff is already spread thin, the resulting alert-and-data fatigue is seriously counterproductive. SIEM can eat up your staff’s time, impair their ability to respond to true emergencies, and induce burnout that leads directly to staff turnover nightmares.
- Slow/late response. In this day and age, it is inevitable that a threat actor will eventually succeed in getting past your perimeter defenses. So effective cybersecurity isn’t just about keeping malicious invaders out. It’s also about vigilantly hunting for active threats that are already in your environment. Unfortunately, while SIEM provides the data necessary for this critical threat hunting in theory, in practice it can make threat hunting too slow and cumbersome. So threat actors get more time to poke around your environment — significantly increasing the likelihood that they will eventually figure out how to do your organization real harm.
What is a Security Operations Center (SOC)?
SOC stands for security operations center. A SOC is a team of cybersecurity professionals who use various software tools to optimize your cyberdefenses, vigilantly monitor your environment for signs of a potential breach, and quickly respond to situations where an intruder needs to be neutralized and expelled.
There are basically three ways to implement your SOC:
- In-house. You can hire your own SOC team and acquire all the tools they need to do their jobs. This approach, however, may be financially out-of-reach for your organization. The undersupply of qualified cybersecurity professionals also makes it difficult to recruit and retain staff.
- Outsourced/as-a-service. Outsourcing your SOC can be a simpler and more cost-effective solution — if you can find a partner capable of giving your organization the attention it needs and responding rapidly to your problems when they arise.
- Hybrid. This model lets you leverage the cost/benefit ratio of an outsourced SOC while also maintaining a small hands-on internal team that can collaborate with your outsourcer while taking the lead on important projects outside the scope of that engagement.
Differences Between SIEM and SOC: Can they work together?
The simple answer to this question is yes. Every SIEM needs a SOC, because you need a SOC team — whether in-house, outsourced, or hybrid — to make sense of and act on the output of your SIEM implementation. But not every SOC needs a SIEM, because as noted above, there are alternative ways to aggregate and analyze the security-related data generated across your organization’s computing environment.
Two approaches that are rapidly replacing how SIEM is used in a SOC:
- XDR. XDR is extended detection and response. Like SIEM, XDR aggregates security-related data from across your environment. But XDR goes a step further by adding templates or “detectors” that can recognize specific attack types based on known patterns of behavior observed by threat intelligence researchers. XDR also adds value with features such as automated alert escalation and response. Also, unlike SIEM, XDR typically offers predictable per-node licensing. Many organizations are electing to run their SOC off of an XDR platform versus a SIEM solution.
- MDR. MDR is managed detection and response. MDR is often considered to be more of a managed SOC or SOC-as-a-service. Some MDR offerings are built on some combination of SIEM, EDR (endpoint detection and response), and/or SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response). But XDR-based MDR tends to deliver the best results when it comes to labor efficiency, service costs, data architecture, and other attributes. Many MDR providers are resolutioning their SIEM tools for XDR in order to deliver the best managed detection and response experience for their customers.
What’s the Best Route for my Company when it comes to SOC and SIEM?
There are many factors to consider when deciding how to best mix-and-match your multiple acronym-labeled cybersecurity alternatives: XDR vs. SIEM vs. SOC vs. MDR.
The key concept to remember is you don’t want to just compare competing vendors’ feature/function lists. Instead, it’s important to take a truly strategic approach to your total cyberdefense plan — which extends well beyond your SOC and SIEM decisions to include everything from your password policies for privileged administrative accounts to your use of periodic adversarial testing to constantly re-assess and incrementally enhance your security posture.
Effective security, after all, isn’t just contingent upon how much your MDR costs per endpoint or how much data you collect from your environment. Your organization’s cybersafety ultimately depends on how wisely you allocate your total budget to build an optimally diversified cyberdefense — and how well you infuse security best practices into every aspect of your organization’s digital behaviors.
To see how an XDR experience but better align to your needs, request a demo. Our experts can help guide what might be best for you, based on your organizational needs.