Gartner predicts that “By 2023, 80% of SIEM solutions will have capabilities that are only delivered via the cloud (for example, log storage, analytics, incident management), up from 20% currently.”
As SIEM solutions start to offer their products via the cloud, you must ask yourself, “is a cloud offering something my security team should be thinking about for our organization?”
The answer is, maybe.
SIEM vendors are increasingly offering their solutions via the cloud due to demand from organizations wanting to move towards cloud-first strategies. Enterprises are seeing economic and operational benefits, like faster time to value from their SIEM, by moving to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) SIEM deployment model as part of their cloud strategies.
To help you examine if a cloud-based SIEM might be a good fit for your organization’s needs, we’ve put together a list of the top five benefits of SaaS SIEM, according to security professionals and analysts.
1. Rapid Deployment
“The time savings in deploying SaaS SIEM is just one of the examples where a SaaS approach is beneficial. Gartner, 10 Questions to Answer Before Adopting SaaS SIEM
Without the need for shipping, receiving, installing, and configuring appliances, you can quickly set up SaaS SIEM solutions, and with log data, you can immediately start to see the value.
In Gartner’s analysis for 10 Questions to Answer Before Adopting SaaS SIEM, they found that about 40 percent of SIEM deployments take more than three months to complete and most of that time is spent on shipping, fulfillment, and initial set up. With LogRhythm Cloud, you don’t need to wait for a shipment to arrive, hardware to be configured, or software to be installed, providing immediate access to a fully functioning NextGen SIEM.
2. Ease of Manageability
“SaaS investments are driven by the hope to decrease manual maintenance (62%).” IDG Communications Inc, 2018 Cloud Computing Survey”
With on-prem SIEM solutions, you get full control over all aspects of your SIEM. However, if your organization doesn’t have the resources or expertise required to effectively manage all these parts, a SaaS SIEM solution may be the best option. SaaS SIEM can help minimize the time your team spends on managing a SIEM infrastructure. Instead of time spent on regular maintenance, monitoring SIEM health, and troubleshooting, your team can focus more of their time on higher value tasks to help protect your organization.
3. Potential Cost Savings
“Cloud-based solutions can help organizations save significant costs by eliminating the need to power the hardware-based security equipment and physical space taken up by datacenters.” John Cunningham, as cited by Aaron Tan, A Guide to Choosing Cloud-Based Security Services
The cost savings you may see from a SaaS SIEM solution will vary based on your organization’s needs, but some teams will find the reduction in costs to be substantial. Infrastructure costs, for example, can be reduced greatly with a cloud deployment model by eliminating the need for real estate space, energy costs, storage, and servers.
Costs associated with maintenance, updates, and down-time for on-prem solutions can also add up quickly. However, subscription fees, cloud storages costs, and trading on-prem management for vendor- or partner-based SIEM management might make the total cost of ownership of cloud deployment models just about equal to on-prem models.
So, a cloud deployment model may cost roughly the same as an on-prem solution, but the allocation of costs will be different.
4. Elasticity and Flexibility
“With the cloud…capacity is already in place and ready to scale up or down in real time, virtually eliminating the concern for traffic spikes.” Mark Pruitt, The Elastic Cloud Opportunity
With SaaS SIEM models, you’re not limited to the constraints of your hardware, so you can easily scale capacity depending on your organization’s needs. Elasticity and flexibility can come in handy in situations when your SIEM might experience an irregular increase in log volume.
5. Increased Job Satisfaction
“Having the best features … can actually make work more interesting and can bring in high productivity among employees.” HashedIn Technologies, 5 Reasons to Consider SaaS for Your Business Applications
This may be considered a “softer” benefit of cloud deployments, but giving analysts the opportunity to use a SIEM instead of managing it can greatly improve their job satisfaction, which can lead to a better work environment overall.
Cloud deployments are always up-to-date with the latest features, managed by the provider, letting your analysts focus on using new capabilities as soon as they’re available. Once freed up from maintenance activities, analysts also have time to work on their professional development and skills training, which are another critical part of job satisfaction.
Choose the SIEM Model That Fits Your Needs
Choosing whether to deploy a SaaS SIEM model is dependent on the needs of your organization and your overall security strategy. When selecting any SIEM, regardless of its deployment model, you want to make sure the solution provides you with the right tools to effectively fight threats.
Both the LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform and LogRhythm Cloud deployment option help you see broadly across your IT environment, identify threats, and quickly mitigate and recover from security incidents.
Get in touch with us to see how LogRhythm Cloud can help address your security use cases or for help choosing which deployment model is best for your organization. Schedule a demo today.
[1] Gartner, 10 Questions to Answer Before Adopting SaaS SIEM, Toby Bussa, Kelly Kavanagh, Gorka Sadowski, 5 November 2018