Securing Customers’ Physical and Virtual Networks with a SIEM Platform

Today, your customers face a perfect storm when it comes to protecting their networks against cyberattacks. Cybercriminals are launching sophisticated attacks at a rapid pace, some of which are able to detect and actively evade security measures. As these attacks become more prevalent, your customers are undergoing a digital transformation, and are therefore drastically increasing their attack surface with connected IoT devices, applications, increased endpoints, and cloud and virtual environments.

In addition to cyberattacks and digital transformation, organizations are also contending with a cybersecurity skills shortage, and often lack the necessary personnel to monitor the network, correlate threat intelligence data, and initiate incident response.

To keep up with this threat landscape, your customers’ IT teams require security solutions that can provide real-time visibility into network activity and regulatory compliance, as well as automatically initiate a response to security events, to increase the overall efficiency of IT management teams. In order to effectively manage network security, compliance, and performance, your customers should consider implementing a SIEM (security information and event management) solution that features automation, scalability, and actionable intelligence.

Here are three major pain points your customers are currently facing, and how FortiSIEM can resolve them.

Real-Time Security

Cyberattacks occur rapidly, meaning it’s impossible for security teams to manually interpret data and security events in the amount of time necessary to mitigate an attack, especially with limited cybersecurity personnel. If IT teams are unable to see threats in real-time, your customers risk having cyberattacks penetrate their networks and dwell there until discovered. On average, it takes 146 days to detect an attack, at which point their data has most likely been thoroughly compromised.

FortiSIEM solves this with real-time analytics gathered from traditionally siloed security and even network solutions across the network. This threat data is cross-correlated between network and security operations and then housed in one centralized location, giving IT teams enhanced visibility into security incidents and intelligence gathered from across the distributed network. Additionally, FortiSIEM incorporates automated infrastructure and application discovery. This provides infrastructure context and allows teams to secure each physical and virtual asset without manual input, which leaves room for error. This maximizes IT resources while improving operational efficiency and security response time.

Compliance

The onslaught of cyberattacks that have infected organizations across verticals has caused regulatory bodies to take note, especially in industries considered critical infrastructure, such as healthcare, financial services, and energy, as well as infrastructure deployed at the federal level.

SIEM provides IT teams the network visibility necessary to ensure compliance regulations are being met through automated reports designed specifically for regulatory measures and standards, including PCI-DSS, HIPAA, ISO, FISMA, and more.  

Cloud Security and Scalability

As your customers continue to adopt the cloud for its cost-effectiveness and ability to scale, a SIEM infrastructure is an essential solution to ensure consistent security due to the comprehensive threat awareness and automation it provides. Threat awareness refers to teams having an understanding of where critical data is stored, creating a plan to identify and mitigate any gaps in protection, and having a framework in place to stop looming threats once made aware of them. Due to the pace of cyberattacks, this is where the awareness and automation provided by SIEM demonstrates value for customers. Using SIEM in private and public clouds, for example, allows for security policies to be changed automatically in response to security events. If data is passed to the SIEM from the firewall, and it is found to be untrustworthy, the SIEM can communicate with the firewall to block that type of request going forward.

In addition to automation and threat awareness, FortiSIEM’s virtual architecture also allows it to scale to meet new high-traffic needs brought on by the expansion of cloud and IoT.

Final Thoughts

Cybercriminals are constantly challenging IT and security teams with new iterations of attacks. At the same time, these teams are working to secure data while propelling their organization forward with new digital capabilities. In order to stay a step ahead of these attacks while optimizing the use of emerging IT resources, teams need the streamlined view provided by security analytics to monitor compliance and overall security posture, in addition to the efficiencies provided through automated responses to identified threats provided by SIEM solutions.

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