What Role Does A SIEM Solution Play In Network Security & Performance?

For many small and medium-sized companies, their technology is the lifeblood that fuels their business. They depend on their networks being available, secure, and functioning efficiently.

Of course, on a day-to-day basis, various issues can pop up that can cause network bottlenecks, such as network congestion, configuration issues, outdated hardware, and insufficient data bandwidth.

Such problems can significantly impact a company’s network performance, leading to frustratingly slow networking speeds, reduced employee productivity, critical delays, unplanned downtime, and even lost revenue.

According to a 2024 report, 45 percent of service engagements have a lack of visibility across networks, making it significantly harder to detect, quarantine, and fix vulnerabilities.

One way to combat these problems is by implementing a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution.

In this article, we’ll discuss some common network challenges and how a SIEM solution can be an effective tool to help businesses optimize their network performance.

With this information, you’ll be able to determine if a SIEM is right for your organization and if so, how you can leverage it to drive your business forward.

What Is A SIEM?

A SIEM solution is a software platform that provides businesses a real-time window into their organization’s entire infrastructure.

It provides visibility into the various resources and users accessing a network, both on-premises and remotely, including servers, switches, routers, firewalls, desktops, laptops, data, internet connections, applications, systems, protocols, and cybersecurity software.

Related Article: What Is Networking as a Service (NaaS)? 6 Benefits To SMBs

A SIEM works by continuously and automatically scanning a company’s network to collect and analyze log data and events. In doing so, it can then quickly respond to potential issues, unusual traffic, or possible security threats and send out alerts to the appropriate personnel.

SIEMs have a host device located locally or in the cloud that is deployed to gain visibility across an organization's infrastructure. Collector agents are installed on local devices to gather data about network performance, events, utilization, and other metrics.  

What Are Some Examples Of Network Issues Companies Face Today?

What happens when your internet service provider (ISP) goes down?

In this case, while your employees would likely still be able to access any saved files, emails, or other internal resources, they would not be able to connect to the internet.

Another networking challenge businesses can face are domain name system (DNS) issues. DNS services let users connect to websites using easy to remember domain names instead of IP addresses.

The DNS translates a user-friendly domain name (like Microsoft.com) into its unique IP address to access a particular web page. In other words, it works like a traditional phone book where a person can search a name to find a phone number.

Related Article: What Is An Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM) Phishing Attack?

But what happens when your DNS service goes down? Your devices are still able to connect to the internet, but your network can’t connect to, or resolve, the website URL. That’s usually when users see the dreaded “404 page not found” or “the requested URL was not found” displayed on the screen.

Given today’s reliance on technology and internet access, such outages could cause widespread disruptions to your business, essentially grinding operations to a standstill.

What Are The Benefits Of A SIEM Solution And How Can A SIEM Help My Business?

In both of these two scenarios mentioned above, and many others, your in-house IT experts or a managed IT service provider (MSP) can use a SIEM to monitor and analyze data across your network.

This is particularly important with network segmentation, since SIEMS serve as a central hub to collect all of the information from your subnetworks and systems.

SIEM tools can monitor applications, databases, and services running, helping you to reduce downtime and optimize network performance.

Related Article: Ransomware Target: How Secure Is Your Virtual Private Network (VPN)?

By providing visibility across your infrastructure, it allows you to quickly spot issues within your infrastructure and correct them before they have a chance to turn into major problems.

A SIEM solution:

1. Provides a centralized hub

• Since a SIEM solution is collects, scans, and analyzes your network for potential problems, it can quickly detect issues when things go wrong and send an alert. This gives your IT team time to assess the issue and determine the proper response.

2. Simplifies device management

• A SIEM can determine the end-of-life dates of equipment, enabling you to streamline planning and budgeting for extending warranties or replacing legacy devices.

3. Maximizes uptime

• It allows you to learn the uptime of your devices to help assess the ongoing performance and health of your equipment. 
  
  
• This ensures you can quickly identify and correct issues, such as slow network speeds, software misconfigurations, network connectivity issues, or weak Wi-Fi signals, for instance.
  
  
• Since it offers full visibility across your environment, your network administrator can use it to more effectively troubleshoot issues and rule out possible causes of a particular issue.

4. Improves threat detection and response

• A SIEM monitors and analyzes different parts of your network for enhanced threat detection and response.
  
  
• For instance, it can scan and assess event logs on your firewalls and switches, Windows security logs, and event logs on your antivirus or anti-malware software, for example. It can also check for an unusually high number of sign-on attempts from a particular device.
  
  
• With a SIEM solution, abnormalities and potential threats can be quarantined and flagged, allowing time for further evaluation by your security team, or security operations center (SOC) to determine whether remediation measures are needed.

5. Satisfies Compliance Requirements

• A SIEM can be used to aggregate data and generate reports to check for specific compliance metrics for state and federal regulations, cybersecurity insurance, or other contractual requirements.

The Bottom Line: SIEM Solutions Help Improve Network Security, Optimization

After reading this article, you now have a better understanding of how a SIEM allows you to gain insight into your systems, with real-time scanning and monitoring, to quickly detect threats or irregularities, and send alerts to notify key IT stakeholders about possible issues.

With a SIEM, you’re then able to implement the necessary remediations to fix problems and mitigate threats. Without it, trying to find and correct issues would be like stumbling in the dark, costing you valuable time in troubleshooting  issues.

So, is a SIEM right for your business?

Since every business is different, the answer to that question depends on many variables, such as what IT issues you’re facing, the size and complexity of your infrastructure, whether you have the internal staff with the specialized skills and time to manage it, your budget, and your long-term business goals.

If you don’t have the in-house staff with the expertise and resources to develop and manage a customized SIEM solution, you would also need to consider how much it would cost your business to recruit, hire, and retain the right IT experts to configure and manage a SIEM.

Given these considerations, you may be weighing partnering with a managed IT services provider (MSP) for help.

If you do decide to work with an MSP, we strongly recommend that you carefully research several providers to help ensure you choose the one best suited to meet your needs. 

We write articles like this to provide useful information to help you make the right IT decisions for your business, whether you choose to work with us or not.

If you’re still unsure if managed IT is right for your business, read How To Decide If Outsourcing Your IT Is Right For Your Business. Read this article to find out Why Are More Small And Medium-Sized Businesses Using Managed IT?

Or, if you'd just like to speak to a person, click the button and simply provide us with your contact information, and one of our knowledgeable IT professionals will respond to schedule a call to learn more about your business and the IT challenges you're facing and see how we can help you solve them.