Managing Your SIEM Internally or Outsourcing
Given the advent of cloud computing, many companies are now outsourcing at least some parts of their IT infrastructure and applications to third parties, allowing them to focus on their core companies. Many organizations don’t want to invest in an IT department or data center, and can’t match the speed and efficiency that Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure can provide.
While your SIEM environment is likely one of your more complicated security applications to manage, you can outsource one or more parts of it to third parties, including content development, application, and infrastructure management. For example, you can focus on developing content internally by your security analysts, have the application setup and maintained by the vendor or other third party, and have the infrastructure hosted in AWS or Azure.
Before embarking on an outsourcing initiative, there are some major considerations that need to be taken before outsourcing one or more parts of your SIEM environment.
Determining which parts to outsource
In order to determine which parts of your SIEM environment to keep or outsource, you’ll need to understand your competencies. Do you have a significant amount of staff with sufficient security competencies, but not SIEM specifically? Do you have a SOC that is proficient in both SIEM content development and investigations? Are you willing to invest in obtaining and retaining scarce SIEM staff? Does your line of business and its regulations force you to keep all data internally? Do you want to keep your SIEM staff internal for a few years and then consider outsourcing it? Can your data centre rack-and-stack a server within a day, or does it take six months?
While these can be difficult questions to answer, the good news is that you’ll be able to outsource any part of your SIEM environment. Many of the major consulting firms can offer you SIEM content developers, engineers, investigators, and application experts to manage everything from your alerts to your SIEM application.
A summary of the SIEM environment functions that can be outsourced:
Content Development
-SIEM correlation rules, reports, metrics, dashboards, and other analytics.
Investigations
-Performing security investigations, working with the outputs of alerts, reports, etc.
Engineering
-Integrating data into the SIEM, parser development.
Application Management & Support
-Installing, updating, and maintaining the SIEM application.
Infrastructure
-Setup and maintenance of SIEM hardware, servers, and storage.
Privacy Standards and Regulations
Depending on what country and jurisdiction your organization falls under, you may be subject to laws that restrict the processing and storing of data in particular geographic regions. Azure and AWS have expanded significantly and have infrastructure available in many countries, allowing your data to be stored “locally.” Additionally, Azure and AWS can provide secure, private networks, segregating your data from other organizations.
While it can seem risky to store your data within another entity, many organizations take advantage of Amazon’s and Microsoft’s network and security team rather than building the required teams internally.
Internet Pipe
You’ll need an adequate, fault-tolerant Internet pipe between your organization and your hosting company. The amount of bandwidth needed depends on the SIEM architecture. For example, you may want to collect log data locally by the Processing Layer, where it will be collected, structured/modified, and then sent to the Analytics Layer. If we’re using Product A, which structures log data into an average event size of 2,000 bytes, and our sustained EPS rate is 5,000, then we’ll need 10MB of available bandwidth in order to forward over the link without any latency.
SIEM application that supports your desired outsourced architecture.
Let’s say for example that you want to collect and consolidate log data locally, and then have that consolidated data sent to a SIEM in the cloud, and another copy to your local, long-term data store. Does the application that will be collecting and consolidating log data locally support this model? Is there a limitation that it can only send to one destination, and thus can’t meet the requirement to send to two destinations?
Other Considerations:
Ownership
-Regardless of how you build and operate your SIEM environment, ensure that there’s an owner with a direct interest in maintaining and improving its condition, especially if working with multiple vendors. Multiple parties can point the finger at each other if there are issues within the environment, so it’s critical to have an entity that can prevent stalemates, resolve issues, improve the SIEM’s condition, and ultimately increase the value it provides to your organization.
Contract Flexibility
-If you’re going to be using the RFP process, understand that the third parties you’re submitting the proposal to are there to win business and compete on price. As a result, some third parties may under-size a solution to create a price attractive to the purchaser. While this can simply be considered business as usual, it’s important to understand that your environment may need to be augmented or adjusted during its tenure, and the service provider may ask for additional funds to ensure the environment’s health. Additionally, requirements can change significantly in a short period of time, which can change the infrastructure required for the environment.
Overall, there are many ways to structure your SIEM environment to take advantage of outsourcing. There are many organizations that can help you manage any part of it. How to do it best will depend on your organization’s requirements, line of business, relationships with third parties, competencies, strategy, and growth.