Security Information and Events Management (SIEM) Buyers' Guide

State of the market: SIEM solutions help you respond to threats faster by giving you a detailed overview of the attacks hitting your organization. But the market has become highly saturated, with a number of vendors offering SIEM solutions or SIEM-like solutions with similar capabilities.

The SIEM market is set to be worth $17b USD by 2029.
Spending has been driven by increasing cyber-attacks and increasing complexity of security tools.
SIEM simplifies security by aggregating data from across your network, investigating security incidents, and supporting responses.

In this guide, we’ll cover our four recommendations on choosing the right SIEM provider. We’ll also cover what to look for in a SIEM tool, the challenges to watch out for, and what future trends you should keep an eye on in the SIEM space.

Recommendations: Our recommendations for choosing the right SIEM tool are:

Build a strategy for SIEM. The SIEM market continues to innovate, which can make it hard to evaluate which vendors to consider when buying a solution. We recommend building a project plan based on your critical use cases and considering the requirements of your team before considering a SIEM solution. SIEM tools are enterprise focused, so at this stage consider if you need a managed option, where the service provider takes on the ongoing management and response to incidents, or if a mid-market tool such as MDR is better suited to your organization.
Reducing complexity is a key driver for many organizations looking to implement a SIEM tool. Many SIEM providers are adding new features outside of the typical SIEM feature-set, for example adding SOAR and XDR capabilities. Look for a solution that can help you consolidate tech and reduce complexities.
Integrations are crucial. Choosing a SIEM solution that can integrate across your network environment, including on-prem and cloud-applications. Choose a vendor with broad API integrations and ensure applications you regularly use are covered.
Finding the tool is just the start. SIEM is not a set and forget tool. We recommend evaluating the customer support and remediation help available to help you set up remediation steps and work through challenges, including dealing with false alerts.
Data privacy laws can have an impact on the data stored by your SIEM tool. Consider data storage and where data is being held. On-premises and self-hosted SIEM tools are available but note that SaaS is the most common sales model for most SIEM providers.

How SIEM Works: SIEM solutions aggregate and analyze data from across your network. They monitor this data to identify potential security incidents.

When an incident is detected, the solution alerts admins and supports with both manual and automated remediation workflows.

SIEM tools also provide detailed reporting on security incidents, including historical data, which can be necessary to maintain for compliance and internal audit purposes.

SIEM tools can be deployed on-prem or as cloud-based platforms, then integrate widely with your tech stack. Most SIEMs are deployed as cloud-based tools with a SaaS delivery model – although on-premises and self-cloud hosted options continue to be popular, giving organizations more control over the data stored.

Core capabilities include:

Threat monitoring: Real-time monitoring of network environments and user behaviors to detect security incidents.
Threat detection: Automated threat detection, including alerts, prioritization, remediation workflows, and support for manual remediation actions. Some SIEMs have extended to include SOAR capabilities for automating responses.
Reporting: Detailed reports, auditing, analytics and records for compliance purposes.

Benefits of SIEM: Most organizations looking to deploy a SIEM solution are looking for threat detection, response, and compliance capabilities. Simplicity is a key use case – as SIEM tools can integrate multiple security capabilities into one platform.

Faster incident response: A key benefit of SIEM for security teams is that it helps you to respond to threats faster, with automated workflows and clear visibility into security incidents.
Centralized monitoring: SIEMs consolidate monitoring across the whole network into a single dashboard, ensuring all information can be accessed easily.
Compliance: SIEM tools support compliance by offering detailed reports and analytics. Many regulatory bodies also now expect organizations to implement SIEM solutions.
Consolidation: Many SIEM vendors are positioning themselves as all-in-one security tools, covering SOAR, XDR and further capabilities. This can help to reduce costs and simplify security management – although does come at the risk of a single point of failure.

Common SIEM Challenges: SIEM solutions can be a complex investment, and there are some challenges to be aware of.

Alert overload: SIEM tools have expanded in scope in recent years and can be complex to manage. Too many alerts and false positives, can be a real drain on productivity for security teams. We recommendselecting a vendor with strong automations and orchestrations to respond to incidents, alongside case management and support for incident response.

Integration complexity: SIEM tools work by collecting data from a wide variety of assets across your network. Selecting a vendor with pre-built API-connectors with common data sources is a necessity. We recommend also selecting a vendor with detailed documentation and support for building custom integrations via the SIEM API.

Resource Intensive: SIEM tools are very established security tools that are standard in enterprise environments. For smaller and mid-sized teams however, they can be complex to run, expensive, and require a lot of ongoing management. We recommend reviewing your internal resource to ensure your organization has the capacity to run a SIEM tool, and if not, consider working with a managed services partner, where the provider deploys, monitors and responds to security incidents on behalf of the organization.

Another alternative for SMBs would be Managed Detection and Response solutions (MDR), which are a managed extension of Endpoint Detection and Response.

Data storage: SIEM tools are impacted by data privacy requirements. We recommend selecting a vendor that allows you to choose where your organization’s data is stored. Some will offer support for using data lakes as storage, which may be a requirement for larger enterprises.

Tool sprawl: Many organizations have a complex mix of vendors and technologies in their security stack and are investing in a SIEM to consolidate multiple tools. We recommend looking for SIEM tool that includes multiple features such as SOAR, user behavior analytics and incident response to help you consolidate your security stack.

Best SIEM Providers: We have put together several shortlists of the best SIEM providers, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics.

Features Checklist: When looking to select a SIEM solution for your organization, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

Threat detection: Customizable threat detection engines analyzing data gathered across your organization, including deep visibility into network activity.
Threat investigation: Detailed data, metrics and timelines for security incidents, including where they began, severity and prioritization to help you deal with risks effectively.
Event management: The solution should facilitate a comprehensive incident response including triaging, alerts, custom workflows, and automated responses.
Incident support: Vendor support and engagement in the event of a security incident which requires manual response.
Compliance reports: Ability to create logs, audits, and reports to ensure compliance.
Integrations: Pre-built integrations with 3^rd party data sources, e.g. identity providers enabling you to easily monitor events and respond to incidents.
SOAR: Automated orchestration and remediation of security incidents via SOAR features. SOAR is being tightly integrated by many SIEM vendors.
User Entity and Behavior Analytics (UEBA): Machine learning technologies can assign risk scores to each user and entity, helping you to track anomalies and mitigate risks.
Reporting and Analytics: Data search, insights, continuous monitoring, and analytics for ongoing and previous security events.
Additional capabilities: Many SIEM tools are acquiring, building, or integrating with endpoint detection and response, IT management and exposure management tools, leading to better protection of network devices.

Future SIEM trends: SIEM has been widely adopted, but there is a lot of innovation happening in the space and the category is beginning to overlap with other security categories. There are two major trends we expect to see happening in the near future:

Increased functionality: SIEM tools are always evolving and adding new functionality. The core SIEM functions of threat detection and incident response have now evolved to also include SOAR capabilities, endpoint detection and response, compliance, and IT management capabilities.

This is being driven by market convergence, such as the acquisition of leading SIEM provider Splunk by Cisco, and customer requirements for consolidation. But a challenge here will be the risk of putting multiple eggs in one basket – there are security benefits of having multiple vendors running independently.

Introduction of AI/ML tools: Recent advances in generative AI and are filtering into a range of technologies and tools. We expect AI to help SOC teams to better analyze SIEM reports and to act as assistants in querying data and assessing security events via natural language enquiries – many vendors refer to ‘Virtual SOC’ assistants that may be as capable as junior members of staff.

It’s still early days for generative AI in the SIEM market though, and we are yet to see many vendors pushing the technology as a big advance in incident response. There is some skepticism in the market on what its effectiveness will be.

Further Reading:

Interview: Splunk SVP On The Evolution Of SIEM And SOAR, Cisco Acquisition
Shortlist: The Top 11 SIEM Solutions

Security Information and Events Management (SIEM) Buyers’ Guide

How to choose the right SIEM software.