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To gain information on network activities, log management and log reviewing should be part of the daily operational procedure, but it is often overlooked as a vital step in information security. Looking through logs all day is not favourable and even with a user-friendly dashboard, it is easy to miss critical events under the pressure of a tight schedule or high-impact incidents.

However, by using Log Management tools organizations can ensure that the untapped machine data & IT security data is extracted and converted into meaningful, actionable security information. Log management tools are a pre-requisite for IT Professionals to keep the IT infrastructure safe & secured.

 

Continuous supply of Log Data is a big challenge

 

Log data is invaluable for managing, maintaining and troubleshooting your IT infrastructure. However, balancing limited log management resources with a continuous supply of log data is a big challenge for many organisations.

Log generation and storage can be complicated by several factors, for example, numerous log sources, inconsistent log content, a variety of formats and timestamps among sources and increasingly large volumes of log data.

How can Log Monitoring help out?

 

With log management organizations can keep up with the workload and stay in control of events happening in their environment.

Making use of log monitoring via a dashboard provides a single view of all log data from the entire stack, giving a real-time understanding of what’s happening with applications. By gathering, storing and analysing log messages from all systems at a central location and presenting the results in a dashboard-style interface. It is a way to process your logs intelligently in real time.

 

5 Reasons for the use of Log Monitoring

 

  1. Detect Suspicious Activity and respond quickly
    Log monitoring shows you that someone is trying to break in before they actually succeed. This gives you the ability to engage in prevention instead of damage control.
  2. Regulatory Compliance, Needed Now or Later
    Where does log monitoring fit? Well, consider HIPAA or PCI, which ensures the safety of credit card data. These regulations not only require extensive logging but also monitoring of log files to look for certain discrepancies. If you’re in a regulated industry, adopting log monitoring now may save you headaches later.
  3. Inside threat detection
    You cannot simply trust every single employee in your company. It may look a shocking reveal but around 30 percent of attacks and hacks happen from inside the organization around the world. It is important for the organization to keep a similar level of security for insiders as well. The Log Management software can easily detect the anomaly in the usage pattern of the workers in the company. In case some of using more resources than expected, the system can track the user within seconds and raise the alarm.
  4. Detection of device failure
    To keep an organization up and running, it is important to keep everything streamlined. The Log Manager can inform the admin about any malfunction in the devices attached to the system so that proper steps can be taken to restart the system as soon as possible.
  5. Control your data
    Gain visibility into what file changed, when and by who.

Try outsourcing your log management

 

By outsourcing your organization’s log management you gain easy access to security expertise, policies and log monitoring procedures, like monitoring the logging status of all log sources, archiving, patching and documentation.

But more importantly, you automatically ensure that the log management responsibility is a separate role and it ensures that logs are outside of the control of internal system administrators. Besides all that, you also save valuable time and resources. If you consider outsourcing your log management. Keep these tips in mind:

Use an Alerting service
Make sure the log events get the attention they need, by letting a specialized team take control of the monitoring and follow-up of found log incidents. Make sure you are immediately informed if something crucial happens and ensure proper handling of incidents.

Custom Logging
When choosing a suited monitoring dashboard for your organization make sure it supports your most used formats and that it has a built-in set of rules to process the events. Not all environments consist of standard devices and applications, ensure that your provider can help connect your systems to the monitoring platform and translate your use-cases to monitoring rules.

Various departments in organizations are finding log data to be invaluable to their work and are implementing strategies to use that data advantageously. If you’re not using log data in your department today, using the information in this post is a great place to start.

To get more information about how to take log data to the next level speak to one of our security experts about our centralized log management tools.