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Move from Product to Capability

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) must be used as more than a compliance checkbox.

A well-configurated SIEM is the core of your Security Operations Center (SOC). By ingesting data from across the technology stack, including cloud workloads, identity providers, and network devices, your SIEM provides the correlation necessary to identify threats and attacks.

Manual log management was an error-prone process. Your SIEM solves that challenge by correlating log data to provide accurate, detailed analysis, removing the noise that comes with false positives.

However, optimizing your SIEM isn’t an easy task. The 2025 State of SIEM Detection Risk Report finds detection coverage lacking when measured against MITRE ATT&CK techniques with only 4 of the top 10 techniques covered, on average. Additionally, the research finds that at least 10% of the existing detection rules in the SIEM are broken, potentially preventing alerts from firing when a legitimate threat is in your environment.

What may get overlooked is that a SIEM is more of a capability than a product. There’s a reason why the success trifecta is people, process, then technology. Without the proper expertise and strategy to manage your SIEM, it could become a dark hole feeding your SOC debt.

In this article, we go over the SIEM from top to bottom to help you understand core capabilities, crucial components, challenges, and operational options to ensure your SIEM a strategic asset fueling your cyber resilience.

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What Are the Functions and Capabilities of a SIEM?

SIEMs have three critical capabilities in most organizations:

1. Threat Detection and Incident Response
2. Investigation
3.Accelerating Time to Response

Most SIEM solutions have a variety of features and functionality, including:

Basic security monitoring: The basic collection, normalization, correlation, and analysis of logs. This is the fundamental responsibility of a SIEM.
Security incident detection: The second basic function of a SIEM is to alert security teams to anomalies or policy violations in an automated way with clear information.
Advanced threat detection: SIEMs integrate intelligence feeds that provide data on current attack techniques that SIEMs use to identify potential threats.
Notifications and alerts: SIEMs can be tuned to alert security analysts when policies have been violated or threats have been identified.
Forensics and incident response: SIEMs have the ability to store logs so that when a breach or incident occurs, IR teams and digital forensic investigators have the ability to perform root cause analysis.
Compliance reporting: SIEMs are increasingly being used to demonstrate compliance by providing auditing and reporting concerning log-in data, user information, IP address information, and data flow.

A SIEM's Role in Log Monitoring and Management

Monitoring, documenting and analyzing system events is a crucial component of IT security, and SIEMs automate many of the processes involved. Namely, a SIEM handles two jobs that were once handled individually:

Security information management (SIM): The SIM delivers long-term storage, analysis, and reporting of log data. This is a complex and time-consuming process, if building your own connectors to your IDS/IPS, Firewalls, DLP solutions, application servers, and other log-generating assets in your IT environment. Most SIEMs have some connectors out of the box today, simplifying this process.
Security event manager (SEM): The SEM offers real-time monitoring, correlation of events, notifications, and console views. This is the key benefit of SIEMs, because excellent SIEMs turn data into visual dashboards that assist analysts in uncovering anomalies and threats.

The SIEM combines the capabilities of SIM and SEM, providing real-time monitoring and analysis of security alerts generated by network hardware and applications. They employ or handle the following:

Data aggregation: SIEMs aggregate security data from many sources, including network, security, servers, databases, applications. They provide the ability to consolidate monitored data so that analysts can monitor and analyze data in a “single pane of glass.”
Correlation: SIEMs search for common attributes, and link security events together in order to make sense of the information. The technology provides the ability to perform a variety of event correlation techniques to integrate different sources.
Alerting: SIEMs are configured to alert analysts when events such as intrusion detection, access control or compliance controls are triggered. SIEMs are far from perfect and are often blamed for being inaccurate and causing “alert fatigue” from analysts.
Dashboards: SIEMs provide dashboards so that data can be charted, and patterns of the data more easily identified.
Retention: SIEMs can employ the storage of historical data to facilitate the correlation of data over time, and to provide the retention necessary for compliance requirements.
Forensic analysis: Because SIEMs can retain data, and because breaches are not normally detected in real-time, the archived logs are critical to forensic investigations to conduct the post-mortem of a breach and understand its root cause.

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Common Challenges with SIEM Security Management

A SIEM solution can be a major force multiplier for a security team.

By providing automatic data aggregation and analysis, it can enable analysts to rapidly identify potential threats that would otherwise be overlooked. However, a SIEM solution is not plug-and-play, it needs to be properly configured and used in order to effectively protect an organization against cyber threats.

Costs and Drawbacks

High costs: In most cases, SIEMs start in the tens of thousands and can easily cost over $100,000, depending on the brand and amount of log data processed.
Difficult to operate and manage: Expertise is essential to the success of a SIEM. In 2024 survey from CommandZero, 76% of respondents said they needed more resources and skills to integrate data sources into their SIEMs. In addition, SIEMs are notoriously noisy, generating many false alerts.
Deployments are difficult: Basic setups of the SIEMs are fairly straightforward, however, “tuning” them to ingest the correct logs, designing access control, setting up correlations, integrating intelligence feeds and so other calibrations can be complex and time-consuming.

Selecting Data Sources

A SIEM solution is designed to aggregate multiple sources of cybersecurity data and provide context to security analysts. This can be a major asset for incident and detection and response since data from multiple sources can often enable the detection of cybersecurity incidents that seem like harmless anomalies from the perspective of a single tool.

However, while access to data is important, more data is not necessarily better. The more data feeds that a SIEM has to ingest and process, the longer it will take to respond to analysts’ queries.

An effective SIEM requires a carefully curated collection of input feeds designed to provide maximum visibility without including excess data. Developing such a feed requires in-depth knowledge of cybersecurity and the sources of valuable data within an organization’s network.

Defining Use Cases

SIEMs run on use cases. While a SIEM can automatically ingest data from an organization’s network, it needs to be told what to look for in that data. A SIEM use case defines a potential attack scenario and how to find it in the available data.

While some generalized SIEM use cases are available, it is also important to have tailored ones as well. The potential cybersecurity threats faced by a financial institution are very different from those seen in the retail sector. Maximizing SIEM effectiveness requires SIEM use cases tailored to the organization.

Defining these use cases requires deep cybersecurity expertise. The use case developer needs to know a potential attack vector, how it can be detected, and how to find that particular information within an organization’s network.

High Alert Volumes

A SIEM solution is designed to filter out extraneous and false-positive alerts. However, it is not a perfect solution. While a SIEM may emit fewer alerts than a collection of standalone systems, alert volumes can still be high.

Attempting to manually manage security alerts can quickly overwhelm an organization’s security team. The average SOC receives over 10,000 alerts each day, and each alert must be viewed, triaged, investigated, and potentially responded to.

Most organizations lack the resources to handle this volume of alerts. As a result, some alerts are ignored or overlooked, leaving the organization unaware of potential attacks. This challenge is compounded by the fact that most SOCs struggle with resource constraints that can create a false sense of security rather than true resilience.

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How Does the SIEM Compare to Basic MDR Services?

Managing a SIEM bears high upfront costs and requires significant technical expertise to operate effectively. Given this, it makes business sense to offload that responsibility to a service provider for faster deployment and lower operating costs by partnering with experienced Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), however the devil is in the details.

With a SIEM deployment, your cybersecurity team can choose which data logs are most critical to the security of the organization. You can calibrate your SIEM to analyze these logs and generate alerts on suspicious activity. With an MDR, you are restricted to the data logs the service provider is willing to review, and that list is often extremely limited. Some MSSPs only analyze around 5% of logs, archiving the rest in cold storage, and many offer little or no customization options to expand the logs analyzed.

If exploring MDR services over a SIEM, pay particular attention to the specifics of the data logs. Services described as a managed SIEM service are more likely to include broader analysis of logs, but it is not guaranteed. Naming of services across MSSPs is inconsistent and one company’s managed SIEM may look the same as another’s MDR service. SecureOps, by contrast, will tailor your managed security services to protect the data that is most important to you.

You Need Deep Expertise to Optimize Your SIEM

SIEMs are proven technology if deployed, implemented, and tuned correctly. However, the upfront cost, training, operating manpower, and complexity can be overwhelming for security teams. MSSPs are an effective way for organizations to access the benefits of a SIEM without recruiting the highly competitive expertise necessary. This challenge underscores the importance of executive security leadership in making strategic decisions about security infrastructure investments. Moreover, MSSPs provide the ability to lease, rather than buy SIEM technology, delivering enormous upfront cost savings.

If you’re interested in the benefits of a SIEM platform, ensure you have the right expertise in-house to operate the tool effectively. If you lack those resources, a robust security partnership with the right MSSP can get you there.

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Is Your SIEM a Log Aggregator or a Strategic Asset?

Move from Product to Capability

What Are the Functions and Capabilities of a SIEM?

A SIEM's Role in Log Monitoring and Management

Common Challenges with SIEM Security Management

Costs and Drawbacks

Selecting Data Sources

Defining Use Cases

High Alert Volumes

How Does the SIEM Compare to Basic MDR Services?

You Need Deep Expertise to Optimize Your SIEM

Deliver Business Value and Build Resilience with MDR Services

Is Your Legacy On-Prem SIEM Increasing Your Cyber Risk?

The Best Way to Assess Your Options is to Talk With Us