Are you overwhelmed by the sheer volume of security event logs your organization generates daily? Take a sigh of relief, the SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) sizing calculator is here to help you with that. Keep reading to learn how a SIEM sizing calculator can estimate eps to gb and take the guesswork out of security event management.
How crucial is it to optimise SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) in your organization?
SIEM tools provide a centralized platform for consolidating and interpreting log information from various digital resources. It safeguards an organization's security by detecting and tracking any vulnerabilities.
SIEM tool collects data from various security sources such as networks, servers, applications, endpoints and so on, and converts them into actionable insights by providing active security use cases.
A tool of this vital importance should be used in optimum capacity to ensure its maximum efficiency. This is where SIEM sizing comes in, SIEM sizing aids to determine the amount of data the system can process & store and can be a crucial part of your security strategy.
Why do you need SIEM sizing?
Properly sizing a SIEM is essential for its ability to handle data volume, which can help prevent security events from being lost or missed and prevent malfunction of the SIEM tool. What's more, if the SIEM is too large for the organization's needs, it can be inefficient and require a high budget. Proper sizing of the SIEM ensures that it can effectively monitor and analyse all relevant security data while being cost-efficient.
SIEM sizing can guide your organization to formulate new plans for your SIEM tool based on its current infrastructure. Having said so, there's no denying that purchasing a SIEM tool is a heavy investment, hence one should consider the returns on investment.
How do you measure the ROI (Return on Investment) for a SIEM tool?
The ROI for a SIEM tool can be measured by comparing the costs of the tool with the benefits it provides. The benefits can include cost savings from reduced security incidents, improved compliance, and increased efficiency in incident response. With its ability to prevent suspicious activities and accurately detect events, SIEM tools provide a return on investment by helping your organization avoid the cost of a cyber-attack (for example: ransom payments or fines for security breaches and data loss). It helps to mitigate risks by detecting the threats early on and preventing any irreparable damage to your organization.
The best-suited method to assess ROI will eventually depend on the particular use case and organization. It is momentous to consider all costs, including the cost of owning and operating the solution, the rate of data ingested, the value of the data, and the benefits of the security insights obtained.
How is SIEM sizing done?
SIEM sizing requires data from log sources in an organization to provide an estimate for the SIEM solution in that organization, irrespective of its size. Log data can differ in volume and quality between organizations, as well as between individual log sources.
Now a question may arise, what are the compelling reasons to ingest more data into SIEM?
With a constantly evolving IT infrastructure, the IT landscape of an organization keeps growing and more assets are added consistently. Furthermore, having more range of logs to take data for reference improves the quality of the result. That is why it's imperative to have flexible SIEM sizing and configuration options that can adapt to meet the needs of your environment.
SIEM sizing needs to examine the number of sources you want to monitor, and the level of detail required. For example, if you have only a few sources (e.g., firewall logs) with limited info, you can use a single SIEM instance or configure it as part of an agentless architecture. On the other hand, if you have many sources with high-level or detailed information, such as network traffic or web application logs, multiple instances may be necessary to monitor them all.
Of course, implementing all of this is no simple task. Like any other field, there are certain rules you must abide by when working with SIEM tools.
So, how do you determine which rules are relevant for your organization?
Most next-gen SIEM comes with hundreds of “out of the box“ use cases and activating all of these rules would eventually result in a lot of noise for your SecOps team to handle the alerts. There are various factors to be considered while determining which rules are relevant for your organization: Industry segment (healthcare, fintech, manufacturing, etc.), existing security stack, compliance and regulatory implications, IT assets and environment, known vulnerabilities and their criticality, obsolescence, etc. to name a few. Key consideration for rule refinement is to provide an adequate coverage against attack techniques and threats.
To get a detailed insight into the relevant SIEM rules for your organization, visit the below link.
How does Positka’s SIEM calculator work?
Sizing your SIEM can be quite a difficult task since each system has different requirements and capabilities.
With the help of our highly skilled technical team, we at Positka have designed an efficient plan for sizing SIEM as per your infrastructure with our hassle-free SIEM sizing calculator that is simple to use, easy to understand, and provides accurate values.
For calculating the right SIEM size, two criteria are considered primarily that provide the volume of data processed in your security infrastructure.
- EPS (Events Per Second)
- GB/day (Gigabytes Per Day)
The size of the SIEM is established by entering the number of devices from your network in the calculator, which in turn yields the EPS/GB generated. The estimate will depend on the statistical data you provide, so the amount of data might vary during the real-time installation.
Given below is a guide to proper sizing:
A security consultant can guide you to determine the amount of SIEM sizing required, applications and services needed to achieve the level of security appropriate for your organization.
Get a quick estimate for your SIEM infrastructure now. Check our SIEM Sizing Calculator page.
