An operating model outlines the controls, the people, and the processes involved with SIEM operations by defining roles, responsibilities, and standard operating procedures (SOPs).
SIEMs often fall short of expectations whilst becoming highly costly to staff and licence. A well-defined operating model prevents this by ensuring the successful operation, deployment, management, and evolution of a SIEM solution.
While an initial deployment may be successful, SIEM platforms are complex and require ongoing tuning and management.
Our operating model draws attention to these activities, ensuring the health of the SIEM, allowing it to meet with business objectives and demonstrate the value it should have always provided.
Without clear strategy and action against each of these pillars, a SIEM platform starts break down. An operating model mitigates against the following problems:
People & Process
The importance of distinguishing roles and capabilities within SIEM is regularly overlooked, without it we see objects become mismanaged and health fall apart.
Single points of failure occur where processes are not defined. A few users dictate over lots of reports and alerts leading to orphaned and broken SIEM objects.
Where there is no strategy around people. User and roles become ambiguous, costs spiral fast, and the value of the platform gets lost. Individual users can, without oversight, act and edit critical settings that have an immediate effect on functionality and cost.
Platform managers should define people and process controls. Product specific training is essential for these users, each SIEM platform requires delicate instrumentation in this area.
Platform
Unmanaged agents lack support for newer log formats, causing gaps in data collection.
An outdated SIEM app might not generate logs for updated software or infrastructure components. This leads to blind spots in monitoring, which can result in false negatives and false operational confidence.
Many regulatory frameworks require up-to-date and accurate logging of security-relevant data. Using outdated platform components can lead to audit failures and large fines.
Data
Most platforms are licensed based on data ingest; not managing and tuning over time causes phantom growth as volumes of excessive or irrelevant data piped in. At renewal this drives up costs without improving value, causing an unsustainable solution.
Poor data quality such as incomplete logs, missing fields, or malformed events can break end use cases and dashboards. The SIEM may produce incorrect analysis, giving a false operational confidence.
Performance
When a SIEM’s processing power or storage is under strain, event ingestion, use-cases, and alerting can be delayed. This means presumed real-time alerts and insights may not appear for minutes or even hours (enough time to miss an operational or security disaster).
Unmonitored load can lead to performance bottlenecks or full system crashes. Downtime in a SIEM doesn’t just interrupt visibility but also means critical logs may never be ingested, analysed or recorded.
Analytics & Reporting
Inaccurate or failing analytics paint a false picture. This leads to users and leaders being unable to call on insights when they need them most, opening the team up to mistakes and make the wrong calls.
Oftentimes SIEM system messages and alarms light up due to incorrect thresholding; these false positives consistently lead to misspent engineering time, thus removing focus from truly critical operations.
Content
Often misunderstood and not managed withing SIEM, content management (CI/CD), is as important here as it is in DevOps.
Without it there’s no way to track changes, roll back broken updates, or understand who made modifications and why. This makes troubleshooting difficult and increases the risk of introducing undetected logic errors, which can result in missed detections and poor value.
Conclusion
In conclusion without a rock-solid operating model, each of these pillars begins falls apart, with dire consequences to SIEM health and knock on effects to business use cases.
There is no way to effectively run and manage a SIEM without one.
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