The evolution of your security stack is similar to the different phases of buying cars. In the beginning, you just need enough to transport a few items, maybe yourself and a few friends. The inexpensive two-door hatchback is perfect. However, as your family grows, whether with small humans or pets, you increasingly need more space and more capacity, leading to purchasing a four-door sedan or, even, a mini-van.
The evolution of your security information and event management (SIEM) solution is the same. When you started out, you had simple needs, centralizing logs and getting basic real-time monitoring to ensure stability and security across limited systems. Onboarding an open-source SIEM allowed you to meet these basic needs. As your organization grows, it incorporates more business-enabling technologies which lead to new security risk management tools.
Over time, these additional technologies generate more logs, impacting performance during high-traffic hours and disrupting the open-source SIEM’s ability to ingest logs. As your security team’s needs scale, you realize that you need more power from your SIEM, yet you may not know what the exact indicators are. If the following signs resonate with you, you may have outgrown your open-source SIEM and need to implement a paid enterprise solution.
A Brief Introduction to SIEM Tools
Open-source SIEMs collect, analyze, and manage data from various systems, networks, applications, devices, and users across an organization’s environment. As a cost-effective solution providing threat detection and response capabilities, they offer real-time data correlation capabilities, often incorporating machine learning (ML) to enhance alerts.
As a security team begins its initial move to SIEM, open-source options include the following basic features:
- Log ingestion: Collecting data from various technologies across the environment.
- Real-time visibility: Aggregating data for faster investigations.
- Search queries: Building and saving common analyses to make findings and issue resolution faster.
- Alert configurations: Setting baseline thresholds to identify abnormal activity that requires an investigation.
SIEM tools integrate with cloud services, supporting both public and private clouds, enabling the organization to monitor cloud workloads and on-premise data centers. They support threat prevention and vulnerability assessment.
When Is Using an Open-Source SIEM Valuable?
Typically, organizations use open-source SIEMs when they need cost-effective IT and security monitoring tools that provide flexibility and customization. Many opt for open-source solutions because they must respond to emerging threats yet have various budgetary, staffing, and technology constraints.
Small Technology Stack
If your organization operates a small technology stack, an open-source SIEM may be a good option. With fewer applications, networks, and systems, you can more easily integrate them into the SIEM, reducing deployment and onboarding costs. In smaller environments, open-source SIEMs can integrate with existing tools while still allowing you to tailor the deployment to your specific needs. Ultimately, these improve security by allowing you to efficiently analyze logs and monitor security events without overwhelming your network infrastructure.
Limited Budget
Most open-source SIEMs are cost-effective because you don’t have to pay a licensing fee. If you have staff who can deploy the solution across a small IT environment, then you can gain essential security functionalities. Often, open-source SIEMs have strong documentation and an online community that makes the implementation and maintenance processes easier. When the organization has a small IT footprint, the organization can take advantage of the low or non-existent cost of the SIEM because staff can manage the low number of integrated business and security technologies.
Basic Monitoring Needs
Open-source SIEMs are the no-frills solutions that balance functionality and simplicity, designed to address fundamental security requirements. Most organizations with a small technology stack require basic security monitoring that allows them to perform real-time threat detection and generate timely compliance reports. With an open-source SIEM, you have an easy to configure and use solution that enables you to effectively implement and maintain security oversight without requiring your staff to have specialized technical expertise.
What Is the Difference Between Open-Source SIEM vs. Enterprise-Grade SIEM?
Your open-source SIEM may provide customized security monitoring. As your organization scales, your security needs evolve which may mean looking at the capabilities that a paid, enterprise-grade SIEM offers.
Manual Processes vs. Automation
With an open-source SIEM, your team is responsible for system configuration and maintenance, like setting up data pipelines. After deployment, your team needs to monitor and maintain the system, ensuring that it ingests data as intended.
An enterprise-grade SIEM leverages automation to reduce time spent on these manual tasks. For example, the paid SIEM license often incorporates automated workflows to initiate investigations which reduces key metrics like mean time to contain (MTTC).
Build Detections vs. Built-In Detections
Threat detection is critical for security and compliance initiatives. Most organizations implement an open-source SIEM solution so that they can identify the specific threats facing their environment. However, even with Sigma rules, building detections manually becomes time-consuming, especially when your team needs to respond to evolving threats and attack methodologies.
Enterprise-grade SIEMs often provide built-in detections that respond to the most common threats facing IT environments. Additionally, the paid licenses come with capabilities like campaign-centric detections that connect isolated events that reduce the time your security teams spend investigating false positives, reducing alert fatigue and improving response times.
Data Aggregation vs. Analytics-Driven Insights
Open-source SIEMs excel at collecting and aggregating large volumes of log data from various sources, including:
- On-premise data centers
- Cloud workloads
- Network devices
- Workstation devices
However, aggregating data provides limited insight, especially as the organization scales and its IT environment grows.
Enterprise-grade SIEMs offer analytics-driven insights that enable security teams to build proactive threat detection and incident response (TDIR) capabilities. Security analytics correlate threats with behavior analytics, like network traffic or user activity. Security teams can build out security analytics use cases that enhance the organization’s security posture, including:
- Insider threat detection
- Malware beaconing
- Data exfiltration
- Compromised credentials
Point-in-Time Compliance Reporting vs. Real-Time Compliance Dashboards
Compliance often drives an organization’s security maturity. From your customers’ third-party risk management requirements to your desire to move into new markets, compliance documentation is a primary reason that organizations seek to implement an open-source SIEM. Often, the open-source solution offers real-time insights into whether security controls function as intended. However, as your compliance needs expand, you may find that you need more sophisticated dashboards or reports that go beyond the point-in-time documentation you currently have.
An enterprise-grade SIEM can provide pre-built dashboards based on the controls that key compliance frameworks and mandates require. These dashboards can streamline compliance reporting with:
- Visual metrics about commonly investigated log data.
- Visualizations that make monitoring user activities and interactions easier.
- Host activities that support and help document investigations.
- Network activity with insights into usage by source, destination, user, or IP address.
- Anomalies that indicate potential security incidents.
5 Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Open-Source SIEM
As your organization grows, so do your cybersecurity needs. While your open-source SIEM initially offered a cost-effective solution for managing security monitoring, threat detection, and compliance reporting, you may reach a point where you need additional capabilities. When evaluating your current and future SIEM needs, you should consider the following concerns.
1. Growing Technology Stack
Your open-source SIEM offered the perfect solution for managing and monitoring a small IT environment. However, as you integrate more applications, network devices, and cloud services, your environment generates more log data. For example, according to Graylog’s Robert Rea, organizations increasingly embed AI tools into their business infrastructures, which creates “limited visibility into how they process and store data.” As your technology stack grows, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- Is my current open-source SIEM limiting the amount of security data that I collect and analyze?
- Do I have blind spots in my security monitoring because my open-source SIEM can’t efficiently ingest and process the increased data volumes?
- Do I need a solution that has data tiering or connects to a data lake to meet my objectives?
- Do I need to enrich my cybersecurity data to improve my threat detection and incident response capabilities?
2. Scaling Business Operations
Your technology stack often grows as your business operations expand. As your business operations scale, you add more departments and people which means more endpoints and user accounts. Your open-source SIEM may lack the advanced features you need, leading to your security team spending more time building detections or having less visibility into your security posture. As your business scales, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- Can my team identify suspicious data movement, like unusual data transfers, large file uploads, or abnormal outbound traffic?
- Can my team identify file and system integrity violations, like unauthorized file changes, privilege escalations, altered logs, or modified permissions?
- Does my team have visibility into network perimeter that target firewalls and web proxies, like tunneling or encrypted payloads that indicate potential detection evasion tactics?
3. Expanding Attack Surface
Adding more people and technologies to your growing business means that your attack surface expands. Application programming interfaces (APIs) connect various systems and applications, transmitting sensitive data across internal and public networks. As your attack surface expands, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I have a way to discover and identify all APIs?
- Does my security team know how personally identifiable information (PII) flows through APIs?
- Can my security team detect suspicious API behavior that might indicate a potential security incident?
4. Increased Alert Fatigue
Your open-source SIEM gave you basic monitoring and alerting that enabled your security team to identify and respond to threats. As your IT environment grows, your security team needs a way to reduce the number of alerts. However, the typical tradeoff with an open-source SIEM may involve disabling rules, overlying tuning rules, or ignoring alerts. If high volumes of false positives overwhelm your security team, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- Does my security team have a way to identify high-risk assets?
- Does my team have a way to triage alerts so that they can focus on the ones that present the most risk to the organization?
- Can my security rapidly evaluate security events based on severity, frequency, and potential impact?
- Is my security team able to correlate vulnerability data and threat intelligence to improve alerts and investigations?
5. Increased Compliance Needs
If your business strategy includes moving into new markets or industry verticals, you may need to comply with new compliance mandates or adhere to new frameworks. While your open-source SIEM provides basic monitoring and documentation capabilities, your organization’s shifting compliance needs may require comprehensive real-time monitoring and reporting. If you need to manage complex compliance requirements, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- Does my security team have the ability to generate reports on-demand for real-time decision making?
- Can I seamlessly integrate reports into compliance workflows, security audits, and data analysis processes?
- Can my security team generate detailed, data-rich reports focusing on threat trends, log analysis, and compliance tracking?
- Do I have the ability to use pre-built and custom dashboards to create meaningful visualizations that speak to executive team needs?
Graylog Security: The SIEM That Grows with You
Graylog Open gives you a powerful, self-managed solution for organizations that need to implement foundational security and IT monitoring capabilities. However, as your business and environment grow, the manual processes can create inefficiencies.
Graylog Enterprise and Graylog Security make it easy for you to mature your security monitoring along with your business. Maintain your flexibility and control while gaining automation, deeper visibility, and streamlined efficiency. By automating routine tasks and alerts, your security team can focus on more strategic initiatives. Meanwhile, Illuminate provides built-in ready parsers and dashboards so that your team can rapidly integrate new technologies to mature your security monitoring and compliance capabilities faster.
To see how Graylog meets you where you are in your security journey, contact us today.
