The given paper justifies the technological necessity to develop a new generation of security monitoring and event management systems based on security information and event management technology. We have focused on the typical architecture and key solutions to design the individual modules of such systems collecting constant security data, their universal translation, scalable processing, hybrid ontological storage and rich visualization, as well as a cross-level correlation of events, attack modelling and predictive security analysis. We have also stated some proposals to use such systems in the domains related to security protection in critical infrastructures.