Why Should Your Small Business Have SIEM?
We’ve written time and time again on the consequences of the world’s largest and most devastating breaches. Every breach of an international or even national corporation translates to millions of dollars lost to fines, legal fees, diminished customer business, and most recently class-actions. Certainly, watching the fallout of a large data breach provides both spectacle and important lessons on cybersecurity best practices.
However, lost in the shuffle of reporting on the largest breaches are the consequences of a breach on a smaller business. In fact, somewhere between 58% and 61% of breaches chose a small business (less than 4,000 employees) as their target. “Cybersecurity must become a top priority for businesses of all sizes”, says Brian McCarthy, co-founder of Cherub Availability Services, a well-known cybersecurity provider for the past 11 years.
Moreover, large businesses tend to survive their data breaches; they possess the resources to mitigate the damages and rebuild their reputations. A small business, by contrast, generally doesn’t have these resources at their disposal. “Therefore, 60% of small businesses shut their doors permanently within six months of a cyber attack”, says McCarthy.
That’s the context, but this information doesn’t answer why your small business needs SIEM especially.
What SIEM Can Offer Your Enterprise?
A SIEM solution can offer your enterprise the capabilities necessary to protect your databases from the digital threats of the day. These capabilities include (but are certainly not limited to):
- Improved Visibility. Network visibility can help you figure out what customer and proprietary data your enterprise actually stores and where they store it. With this visibility, you can prevent hackers from taking advantage of your ignorance and also reduce the amount of data you store.
- Threat Detection. Cybersecurity continues to shift from prevention to detection and remediation, as the enterprise perimeter becomes increasingly porous.SIEM actively patrols the network for potential signs of trouble.
- Log management. Even a small business can generate an overwhelming amount of plaintext data. Within this data may lurk security event information which could indicate a breach or a dwelling threat. SIEM correlates log information to find these breaches.
- Alerting. Whoever maintains your cybersecurity needs awareness of all potential threats for investigation. SIEM provides alerting to aid with that.
- Compliance Reporting. SIEM fulfills and automatically generates reports for most compliance regulations, saving your small business its most valuable resource: time.
Additionally, SIEM solutions often offer email security, which often constitutes the most direct attack vector for external hackers.
What if SIEM is Too Complex?
SIEM carries with it a reputation of complexity and difficult deployment and maintenance which can deter small business owners. However, you should think of SIEM as out of your reach. On the contrary, deploying SIEM can help you evaluate what you might need for your cybersecurity in the long term.
If your IT security team or leader can handle the SIEM deployment on their own, great! If not, you can speak with your solution provider for help—many have strong support staff ready and willing to walk you through deployment.
Additionally, you may wish to consult a Managed Detection and Response provider (MDR) to protect your small business. This will especially appeal to enterprises having difficulty recruiting cybersecurity talent, and can’t conduct 24/7 monitoring alone.
Your small business needs a SIEM and more focus on cybersecurity. The alternative may prove disastrous! 😪
