Effective log management – A way to be compliant

More and more organizations today are gearing up themselves to prove their compliance with multitude of the external regulations, domain mandates, and not to forget their internal policies. In this kind of scenario an effective and efficient log management will definitely make the life of the administrators very easy. An efficient and cost effective automated log management software is a boon as it helps in providing organized log data for the organizations security compliance needs. This automated log management software will also help organizations effectively complete different stages of the log lifecycle. This valuable log data can prove to be very useful in the times where there is any security breach investigation or reporting of compliance.

With the advent of technology, the planet is shrinking rapidly and there is a web of networked devices from different vendors spread across the planet. This setup explodes the sheer volume of the logs and analyzing these logs from incompatible devices can be a nightmare for the administrators. For instance, a large organization running in a heterogeneous environment can produce more than 10TB of log data in a short span of time. Analyzing this data can be a daunting task not to forget the degradation of the application and network performance.

Some of the external regulatory authorities like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and Payment Card International Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) demand effective log management and storage. These regulations need the organizations to not only collect the logs but also periodically review and analyze them, Automated log management software can help the organizations to effectively deliver the needs of the regulators and also keep the organization safe from any security or compliance breaches.

The event data from different devices produced in different formats should be periodically analyzed and should also be classified in more generic formats. For example an authentication failure in UNIX or a Login failure in Cisco should have proper classification that there was a failed login attempt.

There is another challenge in the log management. The log data must be recorded and stored for a longer period of time. For example the external regulators like SOX, PCI-DSS need the log data to be stored for a period ranging from six months to six years. An efficient, robust and secure automated log management software will help the organizations achieve all this. The automated log management software can and will provide log data from different devices in one format and it will also help analyze and store the data. The log management software also has the ability to compress and retain the data.

OpExpert Log Aggregation Module is a robust and scalable log intelligence solution that collects Syslogs and Windows Eventlogs. With all log data available for queries and reports, users can pinpoint the locations of threats or other network problems, creating graphical or text-based reports for management, audits, network planning, and policy validation. OpExpert can store huge volumes of log data to make these logs instantly accessible to support decision making and problem resolution.

OpExpert is a very robust and out of the box tool which is easy to deploy and manage. It will also help the organizations with their overall security and compliance standards. Download your Free Basic Edition of OpExpert from http://www.opexpert.com