Let’s first lay the groundwork, in case you’re not familiar, security information and event management, (SIEM) is a technology supporting threat detection and security incident response through the real-time collection of logs and historical analysis of security events from a wide variety of events and data sources.
But in today’s world, it also supports compliance reporting and incident investigation through the analysis of historical data from these sources. The core capabilities of SIEM technology are a broad scope of event collection and the ability to correlate and analyze events across many disparate sources.
As you’re probably aware, there are a bevy of regulatory requirements organizations are required to meet these days. These tasks can be cumbersome to achieve or left unfinished. SolarWinds® Security Event Manager (SEM) can address this. Different regulatory needs include national and international rules and laws with which businesses must show compliance along with industry-specific rules and best practices enterprises either want to follow or must comply with. In some cases, there are internal policies and requirements they must follow as well. These regulatory requirements could be privacy laws such as the EU GDPR or the Personal Information Protection Law in Japan, healthcare rules such as HIPAA (U.S.), international rules such as PCI DSS imposed by the payment card industry, or enterprise policies on matters such as acceptable use policies or data retention rules.
In the past, businesses were required to show annual or biennial compliance with such rules. Now, however, business owners must demonstrate continuous compliance, which is only possible using complex dynamic and automated systems such as a SIEM system. We now know most of SIEM deployments are driven by compliance requirements such as PCI DSS, DISA STIG, and other regulations.
So How Can SEM Help?
Here are a few use cases to demonstrate how SEM can help you meet your compliance and regulatory guidelines while saving time and resources:
- SEM enables centralized compliance auditing and reporting across an entire business infrastructure. Advanced automation streamlines the collection and analysis of system logs and security events to reduce internal resource utilization while helping business owners meet strict compliance reporting standards.
- SEM is built to make it easy to collect and correlate log data from tens of thousands of devices, as required by many auditing authorities. Using real-time log analysis and cross-event correlation from sources throughout the enterprise’s entire infrastructure, this tool supports compliance monitoring and can quickly help uncover policy violations, identify attacks, and highlight threats.
- The standardized reports available out of the box in SEM can assist business owners in demonstrating compliance with various industry-specific regulations, such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, FISMA, NERC CIP, FERPA, GLBA, GPG13, DISA STIG, and more.
- Business owners can easily conduct forensic investigations with the detailed drill-down reports in SEM. In addition to industry regulation compliance, the compliance reporting can also help demonstrate and verify internal security and data protection policies and procedures are effectively implemented
- Compliance auditing and reporting are necessary and challenging tasks for many business owners. SEM dramatically reduces the resource expenditure required to manage these processes by providing real-time audits and on-demand reporting of regulatory compliance.
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