Why You Should Consider Security Monitoring for Your Enterprise

Enterprises are juicy cyberattack targets for several reasons. They provide an enormous quantity of user data that hackers can exfiltrate; and, equally important, enterprises have the budget to pay large sums in ransomware attacks.

Additionally, many enterprises deal with government contracts and house sensitive information that hostile nations are interested in.

Enterprise security monitoring is essential when the stakes are this high. Let’s dive into what those stakes are, and how security monitoring can help.

How can enterprise security monitoring help manage cybersecurity risk?

Relying solely on prevention is impossible. Hackers have countless ways into a network these days, many of which don’t rely on malware.

Antiviruses and firewalls are preventive tools. They work based on predefined signatures and rules. Although many of them have now included heuristic methods to help determine threats, these represent only the first line of defense. Also, any heuristics in these tools are limited by their lack of data from the entire network.

Bypassing a firewall isn’t the end of an attack. Hackers want access to systems and data and that takes time. Understanding how an attacker moves in the environment is critical to responding appropriately. To remain secure, you must correlate disparate pieces of data from multiple sources to paint the whole picture of a potential threat.

Such a comprehensive perspective helps you respond faster. And, of course, the faster you can respond, the less impact on your organization. However, achieving that kind of dexterity includes 24/7 monitoring, making it a must for enterprises.

Finally, aside from the issues mentioned above, security monitoring is now mandatory as part of many cyber insurances and regulations.   

What is enterprise security monitoring?

Security monitoring is the process of aggregating, normalizing, enriching, indexing, and reporting on multiple data sources to provide a unified view of an organization’s security status. Although enterprises and SMBs often use similar tools for security monitoring, an enterprise must configure these tools to deal with far larger quantities of data.

To understand how security monitoring works, let’s look at the various steps in a security monitoring process.

1. Data aggregation

The first step in security monitoring is gathering data from across the enterprise. In this case, more data isn’t necessarily better as it might lead to too many false positives or slow data analysis due to irrelevant data.

However, too little data can also pose a problem, potentially causing analysts to miss valid alerts.

Establishing what data to pull in is almost as important as aggregating the data in the first place.

2. Data normalization

Data comes in many formats—CSVs, raw log files, XML files, JSON, and so on. Some of that data is unstructured.

Normalizing data consists of modifying the raw data into a consolidated, structured format that the monitoring tool can feed to the next step of the workflow.

3. Data enrichment

Bringing multiple data sources together can provide far deeper insight than when looking at a single data source. For example, a seemingly innocuous IP address in a web access log can be recognized as a potential threat when looking at logs from another source where that IP address carried out malicious activity.

Data enrichment consists of enhancing data with threat intelligence to provide additional context and threat detection.

4. Indexing or ML-based analytics

After data enrichment, the monitoring tool can index the data into categories and then feed it into a rules-based engine that determines if the data represents a threat.

However, rules-based alerts aren’t enough. Zero-day threats and credential compromises mean that a threat can make it into a network without matching any predefined malware rules. That’s why security monitoring must include ML-based (Machine Learning) behavioral analytics to determine anomalous behavior inside the enterprise’s network.

5. Reporting and alerting

The final result of security monitoring is reporting. For real-time threats, the system issues an alert (which can be considered a type of “report”). For scheduled reports, analysts review them to find areas that must be improved.

Security monitoring doesn’t include remediation and response. Once the security monitoring system issues an alert or consolidated report, an analyst and response team take over and handle the threat. This is a specialized skill in itself and shouldn’t be completely automated.

The difference between enterprise security monitoring and security monitoring for SMBs

The primary differences in enterprise security monitoring and monitoring for smaller companies are scale and complexity. The tools are largely the same.

Implementation forms a key aspect, and having an expert cybersecurity team to determine which data is important and which isn’t is crucial. It’s also vital to ensure you’ve included all possible data sources in your security monitoring tool. These sources might include:

• File Transfer Protocol (FTP) logs
• Cloud storage logs
• Web logs
• Internal traffic logs
• Email logs

Why is enterprise security monitoring preferred over an in-house solution?

The first reason for choosing a third-party provider over an in-house solution is that building an in-house solution is extremely costly. Not only do you need highly sophisticated, cutting-edge tools, but you also need the human resources to go with them.

The other major reason is speed: It’s far faster to implement an outsourced solution than an in-house one. You’ll also benefit from the latest technologies which the outsourced provider must keep up to date for all their clients.

Finally, an outsourced solution relieves pressure on HR to find the talent necessary to power such an installation. Considering the massive cybersecurity personnel shortage we’re currently experiencing, that talent might also come at a higher premium than usual, further adding to the cost.

What to look for in an enterprise security monitoring solution provider

When looking for a team to manage your enterprise security monitoring, you should look for organizations that tailor specifically to enterprises. Even though the tools might be largely the same, the implementation typically isn’t. Executing security monitoring in an enterprise context requires far more attention to detail because even minor errors can delay implementation and become massively expensive.

Additionally, a third-party provider must be able to support the tools you’re already using while implementing any other tools and features to ensure the monitoring is comprehensive.

When the budget is available, a third party should also be able to expand to response services and beyond.

Finally, one of the most crucial factors is that any provider should focus on an identity-first approach. Attackers rarely use brute-force tactics anymore, but focus instead on targeting users, often through social engineering and spear phishing campaigns.

Attackers these days typically don’t “hack in,” they “log in” using stolen credentials.

SolCyber’s enterprise security monitoring solution

SolCyber offers an advanced enterprise security monitoring service with simple pricing. Our experienced team knows precisely what logs you need to send over, and we retain those logs for a year. We use over 500 technologies in our stack, integrating them with your tech stack so we can fill in any gaps while ensuring you don’t have to give up on what you’re already using. Our behavioral analytics go beyond signature-based detection, allowing us to more easily spot anomalies in your enterprise network.

Our pricing model is packaged in bundles of 50 EPS (events per second), so you only pay for what you use.

While the average cost of a data breach was $4.45 million in 2023, the legal penalties involved can easily dwarf that number. For example, credit scoring company Equifax paid at least $575 million in settlement fees after a data breach that leaked 150 million records, and T-Mobile paid $350 million after a breach of 77 million records.

Although the financial drain can be devastating, perhaps the most critical aspect of security damage is the ruined lives—millions of people who must now watch their credit cards, change all their passwords, and live in fear because hackers stole their personal data.

Enterprise security monitoring is a must, and investing in a third-party solution such as SolCyber’s can greatly reduce the burden of implementing such a solution in-house. Reach out to us to learn more.