SIEM vs Log Management: Which Solution is Right for Your IT Security?

Feeling confused by so many IT security solutions available today? Well, don’t worry! You’re not alone.

At times it feels as if there are way too many acronyms as compared to problems to be solved, however the outcome of a safe and secure environment is a primary factor.

Two specific technologies rise to the peak once it involves IT security: SIEM solution and Log Management software.

These technologies offer the critical visibility into what’s happening in your network.

What’s the distinction between all the SIEM & Log Management software’s within the market?

It’s straightforward. It comes all the way down to specifically understanding the various styles of logs that every answer is aggregation from the systems being monitored.

You’ll classify information that describes an incident or data which describes the state of a system on the network.

Within the IT business, there are tons of buzz-words tossed around relating to the initial term “Security Information Management”, and marketers favorite term “Security Event Management”, forming the combined term of “Security Information and Event Management”.

In fact, Forrester’s latest report backs it up stating “The security solutions market is growing rapidly because more IT professionals visualize these security solutions as a way to address their stressful IT security issues.

The IT security solutions market growth is huge, as security teams using IT security analytics platforms – as the center piece of their security operations.”

The basics of log management have already remained same. OS, devices & applications – generate logs that contain system-specific notifications and events.

The knowledge in logs can vary in overall utility, however; one can derive lot of value out of it. They first have to be enabled, then transported and eventually stored.

It’s here that the primary challenge of log management arises.

However, users gather this information from a typically distributed set of systems and obtain it into a centralized or a semi-centralized  location.

There are various techniques to accomplish centralization, starting from standardizing the syslog mechanism then deploying centralized syslog servers, to leveraging commercial product to deal with log acquisition, transport and storage problems.

A number of problems in log management revolve around network bottlenecks, establishing reliable event transport (such as syslog over UDP is not precisely the sturdiest of models), setting necessities around encoding, and managing the data storage problems.

This also arrives to a conclusion that log management and network monitoring are interlinked, hence log management software and NMS go hand in hand.

So, the initial steps revolves around – deciding what log and event info to collect, the way to transport  and then store it.

However, that ends up in another major consideration: once you’ve got it, what does one wish to actually use it?

So here, SIEM comes in to picture and the basic log management ends, as it deals with high-level functions.

SIEM software usually offer several of the use cases needed for log management however it adds event management, real-time alerting and analysis.

They facilitate the security layer to mention confidently that not solely are logs being gathered however they’re additionally being reviewed.

SIEM additionally permits for the importation of information that won’t essentially be event-driven – therefore the “Information” portion of SIEM.

So to summarize it, let us break it down for you, in the most basic way:

• Log management collects and stores log files from OS and applications in the network, across various hosts and systems. It can be used for historical data analysis & to meet the compliance standards. This provides a layer of IT security. It can alert users on the set thresholds & provide intelligent reports.
• Security event management focuses on real-time log monitoring, correlating event & audit logs, providing unified console views, and custom alerts/ notifications.
• Security information management provides very long-term log data storage, log analysis, log data manipulation, and smart reporting for stored records.
• Security event correlation tracks & alerts IT admins whenever a weird sequence of events take place, like three consistent failed attempts to login under different IP at same time.

Log Management Software & SIEM solutions have many similarities between them, the former is considered to be a subset of the latter.

Although SIEM offers greater layer of IT security, log management can help users ensure an optimum layer of protection for their networks.

As Log Management is a subset of SIEM, all the features in it are there in SIEM

Motadata provides log management software which includes log collection, analysis & aggregation.

It provides users with a google like experience to search their raw logs using Apache Lucene technology.

There are no time limits to store the logs & on top of it doesn’t compress the logs unlike other tools.

The log management also offers network traffic analysis which gives IT administrators complete control over their network in terms of log and flow data.