The safe keeping of your company’s files and internal systems is one of the most critical components of any IT department’s annual strategy. With hundreds to thousands of individual events flooding your networks and servers every day, you’ll want to ensure that you are equipped with the best possible event correlation engine to fit your company’s specific needs. While the search for the best software to fit your needs both presently and as your company grows may be monotonous and meticulous, today we look at some features to consider in your search for the tool that will keep your company running efficiently.
An event correlation engine essentially makes sense of a large number of actions and seemingly random events coming in large volumes. It consolidates and correlates events from various monitoring systems ,log files or directly from the devices and applications themselves.
the event correlation facility analyzes the relationships between the underlying devices and those seemingly random events, looking for patterns that could potentially cause harm to your networks and servers.
Once the events or patterns or events are tagged by your event correlation engine, you can then take the necessary action to isolate and contain them and move towards eliminating them if you so choose.
You can also take the necessary steps to ensure that they do not repeat themselves in the future.
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One of the most important attributes to any software you are investing in, and definitely a strong event correlation engine, is one with an intuitive dynamic main dashboard that you and your employees can pick up quickly and use regularly. When a software is easy to learn, you limit the amount of time you will ultimately have to train new employees. This can be a critical feature of the software when you consider the typically high turnover that we face in the IT world. Another thing to consider with a great main dashboard is it will also help you and your team quickly and easily track some of your departments most critical metrics.
As your company grows and size and importance, an attack over your network will eventually happen. It’s never the attack itself that matters as much, but more so a company’s preparation and ability to respond to the effects when it does. Quickly determining the who, what, how when and where is something that any good event correlation engine should be able to help with as soon as the attack occurs and the days that follow. While your event logs will have the details, an automated event correlation feature will help you put the pieces together in almost real time. In traditional IT departments, a team of security “experts” would have been left to put the puzzle together, spending many man hours determining what ultimately happened.
Another attribute you’ll want to consider in your event correlation engine is the ability to setup custom rules, to focus on the specific events you choose to and ultimately allow you to make sense out of all the various events that happen over your networks.
As previously mentioned, picking the best event correlation engine for your company’s needs is a very personalized and company specific decision. While the features mentioned today are important, they should be used as a starting point as you explore the software in depth. One thing you should always consider, really for any software you are considering an investment in, is a free trial version of the software. This will not only let you see if it’s a software you can learn quickly, but also test the compatibility with your other software and your staff’s competence.