Log management doesn’t need to be a multi-dimensional maze game without boundaries. This is especially true when regulatory compliance monsters are chasing you — you have to outrace your opponents and navigate the maze within a mandated time.
Organizations are responsible for governance and risk management as a part of regulatory compliance for industry stability. In simpler terms: pick data from the logs and report it or help investigations. But then, are regulatory mandates really that simple, and why would someone mandate and make a law for such a simple thing?
Big Data: Variety, Volume, Velocity
Let’s think about this again and zoom out to see that the situation might be more complex than we originally thought.
Large enterprises don’t have just one log because the data is spread across multiple systems and applications across the enterprise — some proprietary, others homegrown. Thousands of messages generated within a second further add to the complexity; since these are spread across the enterprise, the data format and files differ from one another.
As if this all wasn’t difficult enough, there isn’t just one report to produce, there are many – legal entities, HR, security, and other organizational and team reports. That said, people from different organizations with different skill sets (mostly non-IT) have to work on custom reports meeting their specific needs. This probably makes our maze more complicated and the end-destination never seems to fit the screen.
Navigating the Maze
TIBCO Loglogic handles compliance reporting quickly and easily, and because of its intuitiveness it lets Ameren Corporation, one of the largest investor-held utility and gas company with assets close to $25 billion, create custom reports throughout the company as needed by specific people. Ameren has standardized its entire IT infrastructure on the TIBCO LogLogic solution, which set up nearly 100 redundant pairs of firewall logs in about an hour, and moved its NERC-related Windows servers to TIBCO’s log management software in just 20 minutes.
Demystifying Variety, Volume, Velocity
An intelligent log management solution like TIBCO LogLogic allows organizations to aggregate log messages in one spot, which saves vast amounts of time in man-hours and data processing. Investigations are fast and navigating the maze becomes much less complex. For example: Ameren can identify when a particular firewall change process was skipped for approval, in case of emergencies. Because they’re notified, in real time, it allows administrators to react quickly, compare data, and take appropriate actions for a closed-loop security.
The value from the “ease of use” of the solution can never be questioned. Besides user-friendliness, pre-defined reports offer Ameren a great deal of insight into how reports, alerts, and filters should be set up. And, or course, the dashboards that allow IT to have a single view of “what’s happening.”
With a reliable and a comprehensive log management solution, enterprises are always likely to finish navigating their maze game with top ranks. Read more, how Ameren energized its compliance initiatives.
