Today’s businesses run on data. From getting customer information for payment, processing employee information for payroll, using publicly available data for targeted advertising, to tracking people’s behavior for marketing, data has become the power center of organizations. But with this increased emphasis on data, organizations are now burdened with greater responsibilities.
When it comes to sensitive data, organizations are liable to prove that the processes they carry out on personal data are done lawfully, without compromising the security of that data. Compliance mandates such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have been framed to ensure data security as well as the lawful processing of personal and sensitive data. These IT regulations aim to provide individuals more control over their data.
However, implementing measures to meet the GDPR’s requirements and other, similar compliance mandates can be a challenge. Becoming compliant involves complex procedures such as restructuring your data flow, framing new security policies, auditing data at every stage, and more. As you know, compliance is all about proving everything is safe within your organization’s infrastructure. This typically involves additional responsibilities like generating audit reports, regularly reviewing organizational adherence to security policies, and demonstrating data security.
Sound like too much work? Fret not! There’s a solution to every problem. And for this problem, there’s security information and event management (SIEM). A SIEM tool has many capabilities including the ability to collect, process, and store log data in a central location; correlate different log information to detect anomalies; identify suspicious behavior with predefined rules; alert security admins upon detection of potential threats; resolve incidents quickly with an effective management system; conduct forensic analysis to find out the root cause of a breach; and a lot more.
Attend our webinar to learn more on how to leverage SIEM deployment to prove your GDPR compliance.
In this article, I’ll explain which capabilities of a SIEM solution will help you meet the GDPR’s requirements.
SIEM capabilities that help you comply with the GDPR.
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Forensic analysis: (Article 33: Notification of data breach to supervisory authorities) requires organizations to report on the nature of a data breach, including the number of records affected, likely consequences of the breach, and the measures taken to mitigate any adverse effects. Conducting rapid and accurate forensic analysis helps you contain ongoing attacks. Further, tracing back through a data breach will provide insight for mitigating similar attacks in the future. Therefore, a SIEM solution with effective forensic analysis capabilities can help you meet the requirements stated in Article 33. Make sure that your SIEM solution has an interactive query builder so that you don’t need to worry about query languages for getting the required information.
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User behavior analytics: Ensuring the integrity of personal data (Article 32: Security of processing), means knowing who has access to data and what operations they perform on that data to verify whether it’s legitimate or not. That means it’s essential to monitor user activity on your network. A SIEM solution should come with advanced user and entity behavior analytics capabilities that give detailed information on user logons and logoffs, login failures, user sessions, unusual user accesses to servers or personal data, user permission changes, and more. These security events provide in-depth visibility into personal data access which helps you validate every access and operation. While chosing a SIEM solution, look for one that contains built-in machine learning-based rules that automatically predict anomalous user behavior and warn you to prevent any mishaps.
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Real-time security monitoring: To be GDPR compliant, it’s essential for you to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your systems and services that process personal data (Article 32: Security of processing). To satisfy this requirement, you need to continuously monitor the security events happening in your servers and databases that store personal data and your applications that process personal data. Configure your SIEM solution to detect anomalous security events such as unusual shutdowns, unauthorized access attempts, and more. Ensure that your SIEM solution not only includes predefined templates (rules, reports, and alert profiles) to detect suspicious events, but also has the ability to customize these templates to suit your specific needs.
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Threat detection and automatic remediation: The ultimate aim of the GDPR is to ensure data security in all possible ways. This means you should instantly detect suspicious activity occurring in your network, analyze it quickly to validate whether it’s a potential threat, and if so, take remedial measures immediately to stop future breaches. One of the effective approaches for responding to incidents is workflow automation. A SIEM solution always comes with an automatic workflow and incident management system to speed up the incident resolution process. So, when you choose a SIEM solution, check for predefined or custom workflow options, as well as integrations with your help desk solutions, to implement an effective and accountable incident management process.
Want to know how Log360, our comprehensive SIEM solution, helps you meet the GDPR’s requirements? Read this e-book.
