SIEM for Compliance: Meeting Regulatory Requirements with Effective Log Management

The goal of regulatory requirements is to keep both your company and consumers safe from data theft and compromised privacy. While this is a good goal in theory, if you don’t have complete visibility into your environment, you likely won’t know whether you’re really compliant. You may also not know whether you’re really secure, either.

That can create issues at the best of times, but if you have an audit coming, you’ll want to be well-prepared. Although it can be difficult to collect and sort the data you’ll need to confirm compliance, implementing SIEM tools can improve your visibility and understanding of your environment. Through automation, it can also improve your security posture and ensure consistent compliance.

The Intersection of SIEM and Regulatory Compliance

Across industries, both threats and the regulations designed to protect against them are evolving. Compliance requirements are becoming more complex, creating challenges for organizations that need to demonstrate continuous compliance. Noncompliance can have severe consequences, from fines to a significant security incident, so keeping security environments in line is imperative.

Necessity, though, does not make it easier to bring systems up to speed. There are two essential components of demonstrating compliance, and gathering this information for auditing purposes is both time-consuming and difficult.

• Data collection. Collecting, aggregating, and analyzing the right data to demonstrate compliance can be challenging because of the sheer amount of data constantly passing through your environment. Logging every potential security threat requires a large time investment, and the large amounts of largely unorganized data make finding patterns and properly analyzing the information difficult.

• Generating reports. To verify and ensure that your organization is compliant, you will need to be able to generate a report for each regulation. Given that your data log is likely already cluttered, generating a report from it will require even more time invested.

These complexities can’t stop you from complying, but they do make it more difficult to verify that you are compliant, whether that is for an internal or an external audit. To address these problems, use a Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) tool to better organize data and begin analysis. While a SIEM has traditionally been used to streamline security responses and data collection, it is highly beneficial for this purpose.

Leveraging SIEM for Compliance

Using SIEM for compliance, because of its automated features, is much easier than manually compiling reports. There are several functions of a typical SIEM tool that are particularly useful for demonstrating compliance, including:

●      Automated log collection and normalization. While some human input is still required for complex analysis, SIEM can handle collecting data and organizing it in a way that is less overwhelming and more readable for technicians and security professionals whose time is limited.

●      Compliance-specific reporting. By automating the optimization of reports for compliance, SIEM tools can take some of the legwork out of demonstrating compliance. Rather than creating your own reports, you can pull them directly from the SIEM.

●      Built-in data retention and access control mechanisms. Access control is an essential part of both security and compliance. When access is uncontrolled, it is much easier for an attacker to infiltrate your network and move laterally, which causes disruptions and downtime. With data retention and access control enforcement, even if there is a successful attack, its scope is limited and old data is less likely to leak.

●      Real-time monitoring and alerting. Automating monitoring is one of the most important things you can do for both compliance and your organization’s security. Realistically, no amount of manual monitoring can compare to automated monitoring and alerts, especially if those alerts can be organized according to recent activity patterns. This way, you catch substantially more potential threats and improve your chances of stopping an attack before it can damage your environment.

SIEM is an effective solution for understanding your security alerts, but it is also an impactful tool for meeting regulatory requirements. As security threats proliferate and grow more complex, the role of the SIEM will likely grow, both for security and compliance purposes.

The Future of SIEM and Compliance

To address the growing sophistication of cyber threats, more SIEM tools have begun to incorporate AI and machine learning as well as other novel technologies. Many attackers are also incorporating AI into their attacks, so integrating AI with security solutions is a trend that is expected to continue.  

Attackers are showing a growing interest in methods that make their attacks appear to be legitimate activity, which means it’s more challenging to detect and block them without interfering with authentic users. However, unauthorized access is a compliance violation, so organizations need to arm themselves with the most robust security tools possible.

Going forward, many organizations will rely on SIEM and similar tools to maintain continuous compliance and visibility into their data and networks. There may not be a perfect solution to the growing threats, but SIEM tools can make it much easier to understand what is happening in your environment and what the next steps must be to maintain security and compliance.