Tuesday, February 17, 2009

LogLogic delivers integrated suite for securely managing enterprise-wide log data

Companies faced with a tsunami of regulations and compliance requirements could soon find themselves drowning in a sea of log data from their IT systems. LogLogic, the log management provider, today threw these companies a lifeline with a suite of products that form an integrated solution for dealing with audits, compliance, and threats.

The San Jose, Calif. company announced the current and upcoming availability of LogLogic Compliance Manager, LogLogic Security Event Manager, and LogLogic Database Security Manager. [Disclosure: LogLogic is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

A typical data center nowadays generates more than a terabyte of log data per day, according to LogLogic. With requirements to archive this data for seven years, a printed version could stretch to the moon and back 10 times. LogLogic's new offerings are designed to aid companies in collecting, storing, and analyzing this growing trove of systems operational data.

Compliance Manager helps automate compliance-approval workflows and review tracking, translating "compliance speak" into more plain language. It also maps compliance reports to specific regulatory control objectives, helps automate the business process associated with compliance review and provides a dashboard overview with an at-a-glance scorecard of an organization's current position.

Security Event Manager, powered by LogLogic partner Exaprotect, performs complex event correlation, threat detection, and security incident management workflow, either across a department or the entire enterprise.

LogLogic's partner Exaprotect, Mountain View, Calif., is a provider of enterprise security management for organizations with large-scale, heterogeneous infrastructures.

The LogLogic combined solution analyzes thousands of events in near real time from security devices, operating systems, databases, and applications and can uncover and prioritize mission-critical security events.

Database Security Manager monitors privileged-user activities and protected data stored within database systems. With granular, policy-based detection, integrated prevention, and real-time virtual patch capabilities, security analysts can independently monitor privileged users and enforce segregation of duties without impacting database performance.

Because of the integrated nature of the products, information can be shared across the log management system. For example, database security events can be send to Compliance Manager for review or to the Security Event Manager for prioritization and escalation.

What intrigues me about log data management is the increased role it will play in governance of services, workflow and business processes -- both inside and outside of an organization's boundaries. Precious few resources exist to correlate the behavior of business services with underlying systems.

By making certain log data available to more players in a distributed business process, the easier it is to detect and provide root cause analysis of faults. The governance benefit can work in a two-way street basis, too. As SLAs and other higher-order governance capabilities point to a need for infrastructure adjustments, the logs data trail offer insight and verification.

In short, managed log data is an essential ingrediant to any services lifecycle management and governance capability. The lifecycle approach becomes more critical as cloud computing, virtualization, SOA, and CEP grow more common and imortant.

Lastly, thanks to such technologies as MapReduce, the ability to scour huge quantities of systems log data fast and furious with "BI for IT" depth benefits -- at a managed cost -- becomes attainable. I expect to see more of these "BI for IT" benefits to be applied to more problems of complexity and governance over the coming years. The cost-benefit analysis is a no-brainer.

Security Event Manager is available immediately. Compliance manager is available to early adopters immediately and will be generally available in March. Database Security Manager will be available in the second quarter of this year.

More information on the new products is available LogLogic's screen casts at http://www.loglogic.com/logpower.

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