New Report: Average SIEM Deployment Is Over 6 Months

Brought to you by Panther Labs

One critical approach to prevent and mitigate cyber-attacks is identifying and responding to security events in real-time. Security Information and Event Management Software (SIEM) allows security teams to keep on top of security alerts as they happen.

In this article, we will look at the benefits of getting your SIEM up and running quickly. 

The State of SIEM 2021 report from Panther Labs provides valuable insights from security professionals on the front lines of risk mitigation and attack remediation. This seminal report indicates that security teams can spend up to a year getting their SIEM solution to provide the information they need to protect their organization. 

Why is SIEM time-to-deploy vital?

Your SIEM provides the capability to stay on top of what's happening with your systems, infrastructure, and sensitive data. More precisely, to construct detections and receive alerts generated from monitoring your security data in real-time. 

For the same reason that your business needs to invest in a SIEM, your SIEM must be deployed and configured as quickly as possible. Without visibility into your security-relevant data, you are flying blind. With every day, week, month, or heaven forbid, quarter that passes without the ability to receive high-fidelity alerts over all your data, your risk of becoming the next cyber breach headline increases dramatically. 

What risks are introduced or exacerbated by a slow SIEM deployment?

Of course, there is a long list of bad things that can happen if you do not have a SIEM in place. The respondents to the Panther survey had taken the initial step of purchasing a SIEM platform but were then frustrated by how long it took to get the system configured correctly. On average, it took over six months to begin receiving the high-value alerts they needed. 

Having a SIEM in place but then spending weeks or months getting it dialed-in to execute on critical detections can introduce the cybersecurity unpardonable sin of complacency. The security team knows they are monitoring security data for important events and signals, but do they understand how little of your data is being processed or how limited the detections are? Are they relying on the system to give them information it cannot provide yet, mistakenly believing they see the entire risk picture?

What is needed for a fast SIEM deployment?

With an average deployment time of over six months and nearly 18 percent of deployments taking a year or longer, what's the solution? Are long deployment times inherent in the solution and something that security professionals must tolerate? 

As the Panther report points out, delays in full deployment are sometimes attributable to forces outside the security organization's control. Even still, some things can mitigate this pervasive problem. They include choosing a SIEM platform that provides investigation workflows and built-in detections that can significantly decrease your SIEM deployment time-to-value. 

Conclusion

Having a SIEM platform is essential for addressing today's flood of cyber threats. Security teams must have visibility into security-relevant data generated across the enterprise in real-time. They must be equipped with both built-in detections that can facilitate a fast deployment and also the ability to customize detections to fit the organization's unique needs easily. It's not asking too much to have a quickly deployable SIEM platform that scales to meet security needs well into the future. 

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