Now that you thoroughly understand the use cases and technology underpinning of SIEM and Log Management platforms, it’s time to flex your knowledge and actually buy one. As with most of our research at Securosis, we favor mapping out a very detailed process, and leaving you to decide which steps make sense in your situation. So we don’t expect every organization to go through every step in this process. Figure out what will work for your organization and do that.
Define Needs
Before you start looking at any tools you need to understand why you might need a SIEM/LM; how you plan on using it; and the business processes around management, policy creation, and incident handling. You can (and should) consult our descriptions of the use cases (Part 1 & Part 2) to really understand what problem you are trying to solve and why. If you don’t do this, your project is doomed to fail. And that’s all we’ll say about that.
- Create a selection committee: Yeah, we hate the term ‘committee’ as well, but the reality is a decision to acquire SIEM – along with the business issues it is expected to address – comes from multiple groups. SIEM/LM touches not only the security team, but also any risk management, audit, compliance, and operational teams as well. So it’s best to get someone from each of these teams (to the degree they exist in your organization) on the committee. Basically you want to ensure that anyone who could say no, or subvert the selection at the 11th hour, is on board from the beginning. Yes, that involves playing the game, but if you want to get the process over the finish line, you’ll do what you need to.
- Define the systems and platforms to monitor: Are you looking to monitor just security devices or also general-purpose network equipment, databases, applications, VMs and/or anything else? In this stage, detail the monitoring scope and the technical specifics of the platforms involved. You’ll use this list to determine technical requirements and prioritize features and platform support later in the selection process. Remember that your needs will grow over time and you may be limited by budget during the initial procurement, so break the list into a group of high priority things with immediate needs, and other groups of other data sources you may want to monitor later.
- Determine security and/or compliance requirements: The committee really helps with collecting requirements, as well as mapping out reports and alerts. The implementation will involve some level of correlation, analysis, reporting, and integration– which needs to be defined ahead of time. Obviously that can and will change over time, but give this some thought because these requirements will drive your selection. You don’t need to buy a Rolls-Royce if a Nissan Sentra would solve your requirements. In this step map your security and compliance needs to the platforms and systems from the previous step, which helps determine everything from technical requirements to process workflow.
- Outline process workflow, forensics, and reporting requirements: SIEM/LM workflow is highly dependent on use case. When used in a security context, the security team monitors and manages events, and will have an escalation process to verify attacks and remediate. When used to improve efficiency, the key is to leverage as many rules and alerts as possible, which is really a security team function. A forensics use case will involve the investigative/incident team. In most cases, audit, legal, and/or compliance will have at least some sort of reporting role, since compliance is typically the funding source for the project. Since different SIEM/LM platforms have different strengths and weaknesses in terms of management interfaces, reporting, forensics, and internal workflow, knowing your process before defining technical requirements can prevent headaches down the road.
- Product versus managed service – Are you open to using a managed service for SIEM/LM? Do you have the internal resources/expertise to manage (and tune) the platform? Now is the time to decide whether a service is an option, since that impacts the rest of the selection process.
By the end of this phase you should have defined key stakeholders, convened a selection team, prioritized the systems to protect, determined protection requirements, and roughed out workflow needs.
Formalize Requirements
This phase can be performed by a smaller team working under the mandate of the selection committee. Here the generic needs determined in phase 1 are translated into specific technical features, and any additional requirements are considered. This is the time to come up with criteria for collection and aggregation, additional infrastructure integration, data storage/archival, deployment architecture, management and identity integration, and so on. You may need to dig into what information your devices provide to ensure you can collect the necessary data to reliably feed the SIEM platform. You can always refine these requirements as you proceed through the selection process and get a better feel for how the products work.
At the conclusion of this stage you develop a formal RFI (Request For Information) to release to vendors, and a rough RFP (Request For Proposals) that you’ll clean up and formally issue in the evaluation phase.
Evaluate Products
All the SIEM/LM vendors tell similar stories, which makes it difficult to cut through the marketing and figure out whether a product really meets your needs. The following steps should minimize your risk and help you feel confident in your final decision:
- Issue the RFI: Larger organizations should issue an RFI though established channels and contact a few leading SIEM/LM vendors directly. If you’re a smaller organization, start by sending your RFI to a trusted VAR and email a few SIEM/LM vendors which seem appropriate for your organization.
- Define the short list: Before bringing anyone in, match any materials from the vendor or other sources to your RFI and draft RFP. Your goal is to build a short list of 3 products which can satisfy most of your needs. You should also use outside research sources and product comparisons. Understand that you’ll likely need to compromise at some point in the process, as it’s unlikely any one vendor can meet every requirement.
- Dog and Pony Show: Instead of generic presentations and demonstrations, ask the vendors to walk you through specific use cases that match your expected needs. This is critical, because the vendors are very good at showing cool eye candy and presenting the depth of their capabilities, while redefining your requirements based on their strengths. Don’t expect a full response to your draft RFP; these meetings are to help you better understand how each vendor can solve your specific use cases and to finalize your requirements.
- Finalize and issue your RFP: At this point you should completely understand your specific requirements, and issue a final formal RFP.
- Assess RFP responses and start proof of concept (PoC): Review the RFP results and drop anyone who doesn’t meet your hard requirements, such as platform support. Then bring in any remaining products for in-house testing. You’ll want to replicate your projected volume and data sources if at all possible. Build a few basic policies that match your use cases, then violate them, so you can get a feel for policy creation and workflow. And make sure to do some forensics work and reporting so you can understand the customization features. Understand that you need to devote resources to each PoC and stick to the use cases. The objective here is to put the product through its paces and make sure it meets your needs.
Selection and Deployment
- Select, negotiate, and buy: Finish testing, take the results to the full selection committee, and begin negotiating with your top two choices, assuming more than one meets your needs. Yes, this takes more time, but you want to be able to walk away from one of the vendors if they won’t play ball with pricing, terms, and conditions.
- Implementation planning: Congratulations, you’ve selected a product, navigated the procurement process, and made a sales rep happy. But now the next stage of work begins – as the end selection you need to plan the deployment. That means making sure of little details like lining up resources, getting access/credentials to devices, locking in an install schedule, and even the logistics of getting devices to the right locations. No matter how well you execute on the selection, unless you implement flawlessly and focus on quick wins and getting immediate value from the SIEM/LM platform, your project will be a failure.
I can hear your groans from small to medium sized business who look at this process and think this is a ridiculous amount of detail. Once again we want to stress that we created a granular selection process, but you can pare this down to meet your organization’s requirements. We wanted to make sure we captured all the gory details some organizations need to go through for a successful procurement. The process outlined is appropriate for a large enterprise but a little pruning can make it manageable for small groups. That’s the great thing about process: you can change it any way you see fit at no expense.
With that, we end our series on Understanding and Selecting a SIEM/Log Management platform. Hopefully the content will be useful as you proceed through your own selection process. As always, we appreciate all your comments on our research. We’ll be packaging up the entire series as a white paper over the next few weeks, so stay tuned for that.
Reader interactions
One Reply to “Understanding and Selecting SIEM/LM: Selection Process”
Pure gold, thanks for sharing, the “dog and pony show” its brilliant idea.
Regards, Rafael