Why Is Managed SIEM Important for Credit Unions?
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is an integral facet of your credit union’s IT department’s responsibilities. Your IT staff may have some SIEM capabilities of their own, but might you be better served by a third party?
Managed SIEM allows credit unions to scale their security information and event management platform. An outsourced model improves the overall security of your credit union, assists with increased compliance, and enables rapid detection and in turn a more rapid resolution. To keep valuable credit union and member information safe, you’ll need to keep a stalwart eye on any security threats or attacks. Being able to detect and be informed of active threats in the environment as they happen is crucial to protecting member data. As a result, the National Credit Union Association (NCUA) is taking a closer look at SIEM systems in credit unions across a wide range of asset sizes and how the organizations are alerting on and responding to threats What can managed, third-party SIEM offer to help with these challenges?
- Detect and Respond to Threats
- Aggregation and Correlation
- 24/7 Monitoring
- Expert Help
1. Detect and Respond to Threats
This is the core of SIEM service. The primary purpose is to identify and react to unusual behavior, security threats, active attacks, and breaches to your credit union’s network.
- Managed SIEM is the monitoring of devices and services and provides the following benefits, among others: Gather, analyze, store, and present actionable data
- Reduce risk and assess vulnerability
- Maintain accurate records and logs
- Ensure compliance
Not only does managed SIEM for credit unions provide greater peace of mind regarding potentially harmful activity, but we also take away worries you may have about meeting regulations and laws pertaining to the prevention of that activity.
2. Aggregation and Correlation
Managed SIEM for credit unions grants the same level of data and information services that are available to large financial institutions. It can log all information, events, and activity centrally and keep it inactive storage.
Third-party managed SIEM is able to leverage aggregated and stored data to mark trends or identify anomalies. As a result, instead of reviewing events and information piecemeal or looking at individual systems and trying to connect the dots, credit unions must take a holistic approach.
Having access to data that spans domain events, firewall events, or network activity paints a clearer picture as to what’s happening in your credit union’s IT realm. Monitoring data as a whole, or discerning and correlating event data can help you better pinpoint problem areas and shore up weaknesses.
3. 24/7 Monitoring – Watch It Like a Hawk!
Having a centralized SIEM solution is of tremendous use to an IT department. However, one of the less-obvious benefits of a third-party-managed SIEM solution is the level of monitoring that they can provide.
Whereas IT departments can’t reasonably be expected to monitor security events 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, third-party SIEM managers can do exactly that.
Managed SIEM means some level of real-time monitoring, maintenance, or management. Consequently, a third party can oversee network operations, analyzing threats and events as they occur; they can identify and analyze continuously, reducing the likelihood of missing an event or anomaly that could be the sign of a breach.
4. Expert Help – Let the Pros Handle It!
Finally, the importance of freeing up labor time for your IT department can’t be overstated. Most IT departments are stretched relatively thin. Hiring a third-party SIEM manager, frees up internal IT resources to tackle the various and sundry daily operations and complications endemic to credit unions.
The best part is, you can rest knowing that the people you entrust with managing your security and information event management have dedicated themselves to becoming experts in the field. They’re trained specifically to efficiently ensure your credit union’s safety while fully demonstrating compliance.
Your Credit Union has a duty to keep your members and their information safe, but that doesn’t mean you need to burden your IT team. Learn how our managed SIEM experts at Ongoing Operations can help your credit union.
Ongoing Operations is a CUSO (Credit Union Service Organization)
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