5 Reasons Your Credit Union Needs A SIEM System
The Credit Union industry increasingly relies on technology to offer the best possible services to its members. This creates an ever-growing technological footprint that requires constant maintenance and security. Credit Union Information Technology (IT) teams are often faced with the challenge of staffing in proportion with this growth, so it is important for them to utilize their tools efficiently. One of the best solutions to help ease the burden on IT teams is to deploy a system for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM).
A SIEM system is technology that centralizes the collection of log data and provides automated analysis of that information. The analysis can identify events that could negatively impact a Credit Union’s information systems and customer data. SIEM provides a Credit Union with 24×7 monitoring of all activity generated by users and systems within their computer network. It can ingest, parse, and correlate significant amounts of data from multiple sources in near real-time, and alert on security events.
A properly configured and managed SIEM system reduces administrative overheads and becomes a force multiplier for a Credit Union’s IT team. It makes a Credit Union substantially more effective at identifying and responding to security events. A SIEM facilitates compliance with ever-increasing regulatory requirements through long-term log storage, and by providing reports on system health and event status. With a properly deployed and managed SIEM system, a Credit Union gains the following five benefits.
One: 24×7 Network Monitoring
A SIEM system is not bound by a schedule. It is tireless and always vigilant. It continues to work while a Credit Union’s staff is off the clock. It is vendor agnostic and can ingest and parse the logs from a variety of applications and devices. A good SIEM system provides complete coverage of a Credit Union’s IT infrastructure, both on-premises and in the Cloud.
Two: Log and Alert Centralization
A SIEM system provides short term log storage for immediate analysis and correlation of events, and long term storage for compliance with log retention policies and analysis of historical data. A good SIEM system not only preserves the raw log data but also includes the ability to gather and store evidence during incident response and track the status of security events. It reduces the need for a Credit Union’s IT team to configure security alerts on every in-scope system and makes it easier for the team to correlate security events from disparate systems.
Three: Security Event Correlation
A SIEM provides insight into not only potential threats from a single source, or to a single asset, but also suspicious activity across multiple systems and data points. A good SIEM ingests external threat feeds to correlate a Credit Union’s activity with known malicious activity and suspicious patterns, also known as Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) It also conducts ongoing global and vendor analysis to provide up-to-date and near real-time protection against new and emerging threats.
Four: Security Force Multiplication
A SIEM system increases a Credit Union’s visibility into its computer network and reduces overall incident response time. It eliminates the need to manually monitor systems, analyze logs, and hunt threats. By reducing the burden of maintaining security, it allows a Credit Union’s IT staff to focus on business support and delivery.
Five: Regulatory and Company Compliance
A SIEM system provides compliance with log retention requirements and allows a Credit Union to effectively implement other commonly audited security controls such as regular reviews of administrative activity and system access failures. A Credit Union can leverage the SIEM system’s reporting capabilities to conduct regular health checks and ensure the system is functioning as expected, as well as analyze historical events for trends, and provide useful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to managers, executives, and board members.
A SIEM system that is deployed and managed well offers many benefits to a Credit Union that wants to stay innovative in its service offerings without sacrificing IT resources do so, while maintaining a high level of security for its assets and members. Given the challenges of balancing budgets against the rise in cybersecurity incidents worldwide and increasing regulatory requirements, a SIEM system is a valuable tool in any Credit Union’s IT security arsenal.
Want to find out if a managed SIEM solution is right for your Credit Union? Contact Ongoing Operations today to see how our Managed SEM solution can help you.