Regulatory compliance is here to stay, and under the Obama administration, corporate accountability requirements are likely to grow. Log management and SIEM correlation technologies can work together to provide more comprehensive views to help companies satisfy their regulatory compliance requirements, make their IT and business processes more efficient and reduce management and technology costs in the process.
IT organizations also will expect log management and intelligence technologies to provide more value to business activity monitoring and business intelligence. Though SIEM will continue to capture security-related data, its correlation engine can be re-appropriated to correlate business processes and monitor internal events related to performance, uptime, capability utilization and service-level management. We will see the combined solutions provide deeper insight into not just IT operations but also business processes. For example, we can monitor business processes from step A to Z and, if a step was missed, we'll see where and when.
In short, by integrating SIEM and log management, it is easy to see how companies can save by de-duplicating efforts and functionality. The functions of collecting, archiving, indexing and correlating log data can be collapsed. That will also lead to savings in the resources required and the maintenance of the tools.
It gets even more exciting when you can apply log-based activity data and security-event-inspired correlation to other business problems. Regulatory compliance, business activity monitoring and business intelligence are just the tip of the iceberg. Leading-edge customers are already using the tools to increase visibility and the security of composite Web 2.0 applications, cloud-based services and mobile devices. The key is to start with a central record of user and system activity and build an open architecture that lets different business users access the information to solve different business problems.
Levin is executive vice president of strategy at LogLogic in San Jose.