While IT security threats and their impact on business continue to grow and evolve, organizations are facing shrinking budgets, skilled resource attrition, competing priorities and more complex environments. Liabilities associated with inadequate security management are becoming more severe, ranging from costly downtime to penalties for regulatory noncompliance.

Along with these challenges comes the problem of performing log management in a way that helps provide visibility and insight into your network and IT infrastructure in addition to meeting industry and government compliance requirements. With the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks and the robust defenses necessary to protect an enterprise, you can no longer look to log management for simple aggregation, display and storage. This is particularly true in a hybrid environment in which your firm may have multiple IT platforms. Also, monitoring logs is a requirement for regulations such as the Payment Card Industry Security Standards, the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Sarbanes–Oxley Act.

Today’s enterprise needs its managed security service provider to deliver a better level of protection for security management at a significantly lower cost. The broad adoption of security information and event management technology is being driven by the need to detect threats and breaches as well as compliance reporting needs. The use cases for compliance, threat management and threat intelligence vary, but log management, reporting and deployment simplicity remain core capabilities in all.

Event and log data provide invaluable insight into the security of your infrastructure, but the sheer volume of data generated by your systems can be overwhelming to gather and manage. Also, in-house deployments can be costly and take much longer to deploy. Increased threats and expanding compliance requirements need more automated, proactive approaches to security management for forensic off-site storage.

Organizations seek cloud-delivered solutions to enable cost-effectiveness, rapid deployment, scalability and, more importantly, on-demand access to expertise. Log management is the first logical step in a seamless journey with managed services partner that can grow as your security program matures by implementing new capabilities and leveraging the same cloud technology and infrastructure.

Today’s enterprises need a managed security services provider that can deliver a flexible solution at a significantly reduced cost and provide a seamless upgrade path. The provider’s platform should be capable of offering log management with basic alert monitoring and an integrated security intelligence view with a combination of analytics and event monitoring for flow, vulnerability and log data.

The core capabilities for this type of service will differ but should contain the following qualities:

• Flexibility: A full suite of upgradable security intelligence offerings and service tiers from which to choose
• Cost-Effectiveness: Easy to acquire and deploy with no capital expenditures
• Skill Access: Trusted security service professionals available to provide guidance and meet your security requirements

Your security posture can be strengthened through enhanced awareness, global threat intelligence, correlation and analysis, as well as deep, holistic vulnerability management and application security that can help address the most demanding compliance and protection requirements.

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