What is the difference between SIEM and Next-Generation SIEM

As cyber threats evolve, the technologies used by organizations to protect themselves must too. It’s time to replace your traditional SIEM with a Next-Gen/Next-Generation SIEM solution with more effective cyber protection capabilities. Let’s see the reasons! 

Next-Generation SIEM vs. traditional SIEM  

SIEM tools revolutionized the world of computing in 2005 when facilitating IT professionals’ work in businesses’ systems security management. In the beginning, the traditional SIEM solutions were designed for centralized log management, collecting and aggregating logs data from different sources in a secure, separate location. As a result, logs remain intact in a compromise or hardware failure, helping organizations track and monitor suspicious activities that indicate cyber threats. However, traditional SIEM doesn’t have the automated capabilities for real-time threats detection and incident response that a Next-Gen SIEM platform gives. 

• Security Alert Noises 

When implementing traditional SIEM, IT teams are inundated with many security alert noises that are challenging to handle daily. As a result, many teams tend to classify the alerts as false positives for dealing with alert fatigue. Therefore, security analysts lose the critical alerts that indicate threats, and organizations get compromised. The first SIEM generation required expert data analysis and a skilled team able to filter out the growing avalanche of false positives to discover the real security threats. 

Using a Next-Gen SIEM platform like UTMStack solves this issue through filters that standardize log fields and an AI-powered event correlation engine based on several correlations rules. In this way, cybersecurity experts only receive critical alerts broken down by IP source and destination details, which facilitates forensic analysis and threat detection. 

• Threat Detection 

Threat detection is conformed by threat intelligence, cyber threat hunting, and anomaly detection techniques. Anomaly detection helps to identify events, behavior, and patterns to be unusual or suspicious that can become threats to organizations. Unlike traditional SIEM, a Next-Gen SIEM includes this threat detection capability that allows organizations to identify and predict threats and attack attempts. 

The UTMStack machine learning anomaly-based engine analyzes the environment and defines custom rules and baselines. This learning mechanism allows the system to learn from the environment and gain the ability to identify abnormal and threatening behavior. 

• Incident Response 

The incident response team addresses and manages the security breaches of organizations. Usually, Next-Generation SIEM platform providers handle the security incident process through a customized incident response plan according to the client’s needs. Currently, Next-Gen SIEM includes functionality from Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) for faster threat detection and response. 

UTMStack supports incident response automation SOAR from its dashboard, accepting several actions such as isolating hosts, killing processes, logging off, blocking users or IPs, etc. 

• Customized Dashboards and Reportings

Traditional SIEM solutions come with a fixed set of pre-created dashboards and reports to fit most clients’ most common compliance needs. However, not all environments are the same, and every organization has unique use cases that need customs dashboards and reports. Once again, Next-Gen SIEM came to solve this capacity.  

UTMStack dashboards and reports can be created, modified, and deleted without writing a single line of code. The entire solution has been built on a proprietary data visualization and analysis engine that flexibles the entire stack building from the ground by any advanced user. 

• Compliance 

Organizations that want to implement the best cybersecurity practices must include a SIEM that handles compliance. Unfortunately, traditional SIEM and compliance are not integrated. However, the UTMStack cost-effective Next-Generation SIEM manages  FISMA, HIPAA, GLBA, GDPR, SOC, PCI DSS, CMMC, and other standards compliance.  

• Cloud-based SIEM 

With increasingly cloud-based infrastructures, new service-oriented architectures, and Internet and user traffic at unparalleled levels, a traditional SIEM cannot effectively monitor and protect against modern security threats. A cloud-based Next-Generation SIEM offers the fastest distribution of threat intelligence. It also includes the server time needed to process large volumes of log data. 

With the UTMStack cloud-based SIEM, all users, applications, devices, servers, and other endpoints can be monitored and managed effectively and efficiently. UTMStack can also receive or pull logs from multiple sources such as Syslog, APIs, Webservice, etc. The platform is currently integrated with Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Also, it is integrated with SaaS and PaaS, such as Office365 and AWS Lamda. 

A traditional SIEM, at its time, provided security to simple IT environments. However, with the new advances in technological ecosystems, organizations need advanced tools to comply with the best cybersecurity practices and effectively manage and monitor all vulnerabilities. Today, the Next-Generation SIEM platform is the most advanced solution to protect organizations from proactively way against sophisticated threats and all types of cyber-attacks.