Here are six best practices that apply to almost every organization in the world. We’ll look at each here. Be aware, though, that every business and other organization has a niche, and your niche might produce a few SIEM practices just as vital to your cybersecurity, which we don’t address here.

1. Make SIEM part of your security stack

A modern SIEM is a key component of any strong cybersecurity strategy. SIEM provides visibility and control across your entire environment, from real-time threat detection to alerting and compliance support. Integrating it into your security stack makes sure you’re always prepared for both common and emerging threats. 

2. Prioritize high-value log sources first

The focus has shifted away from collecting and analyzing every scrap of data that moves through your system. Modern SIEM best practices focus on prioritizing the logs from your most critical infrastructure. These might be endpoints, web servers, firewalls, databases, or domain controllers, but they will certainly vary from organization to organization. Ideally, you'll also make external threat intelligence part of the process. 

3. Tune correlation rules continuously

SIEM monitoring best practices are practically universal. You'll need to constantly tinker with your detection rules to uncover the kind of event patterns that generate true positive alerts. This is part of a process called SIEM optimization, which should also include performing regular SIEM health checks, optimizing your log and data storage, integrating new threat intelligence, and normalization and enriching of data.

4. Automate noisy alert suppression

SIEM alerts best practices also require suppressing the alerts that distract your people when they need to be doing something else. One of the best ways to do this is by integrating SOAR tools into your SIEM (something Huntress Managed SIEM does right out of the box). 

This capacity allows for automation of basic and time-sensitive incident responses and streamlines the workflow of your IT security people dramatically. In addition, automating the process of alerting your security people about critical events goes a long way towards making sure no opportunity to improve your security posture is missed. 

5. Link SIEM data to incident-response playbooks

Once you have clear, effective procedures for handling the security incidents your SIEM detects, the battle is all but won. Make sure the policy covers detection, containment, intervention, and recovery.

6. Measure KPIs (MTTD, MTTR) and adjust

Typically, SIEM systems are categorized in terms of where they reside or where their operators work. For example:

• On-premise SIEM is the old standard, where the system resides on an on-premise server and your own security team operates it.

• Cloud-based SIEM solutions operate largely without direct human oversight from a remote server, typically outputting to a dashboard. 

• Managed SIEM systems, where a third-party security team or SOC oversees the SIEM.

In terms of SIEM best practices, the core roles of SIEM are in what it does for you:

• Compliance and forensic support

• Up-to-the-minute network visibility

• Automation of security functions

The most effective way to ensure SIEM best practices are in place is to use a managed SIEM solution like Huntress Managed SIEM. We regularly redefine, measure, re-evaluate, and optimize all of our clients' SIEM functions, from detection rules to remediation to automation. Book a demo and see how Huntress ensures your security posture evolves with today’s threats.