Every hour of every day hundreds to thousands of events are flooding your company’s network and causing unwanted and sometimes unknown noise. From your activity logs, to user login logs and beyond, managing and maintain awareness of all of the events occurring can be critical in protecting your company. To help do so, procuring a proper event monitoring software to monitor your company’s events is always a good idea to consider.
Event monitoring or event correlation type tools are more and more becoming a stable in IT departments of all sizes all over the world. Let us today examine some of the key features to consider when doing your research into the best software to align with your needs, both presently and as your company grows.
In its essence, an event monitoring software uses a form of event correlation to look at all of the events happening in real-time on your network and find any associated correlation between them, often times the negative ones. Finically driven fraud, brute force entry attacks at the login points, and other forms of malicious attacks on your network and company can be identified early by an adequate event monitoring software by recognizing patterns in the events that precede them. On the flipside to detecting potential security threats, much of the event driven noise that floods your network ultimately boils down to just that; noise. Often times, without the proper event monitoring software, IT departments painstakingly spend resources and employee time looking into things that ultimately prove to be harmless. With that said, the proper event monitoring software can not only improve your company’s efficiency and safety, but help save on labor costs as well.
Alerts via software are a constant in this day and age and your event monitoring software should be no different. As potentially harmful events are brewing on your network, you’ll want to be notified as soon possible to act on them and get them under control. When an attempt of an attack ultimately does happen on your network, you will not only want to know as it happens but as much detail as possible as to what it is you are really dealing with. In what is referred to as “the malicious actor”, information like intent and attacker location is just a few of the nuggets you will want your event monitoring software to convey. As far as the transmitting of the alert or alarm, much software offer it in a variety of forms including but not limited to SMS, email or within the software directly on your desktop.
With so many IT professionals now working remotely, finding an event monitoring software that is mobile or tablet friendly is another good idea to consider in your search. While some software often an app version, a browser version that is mobile friendly can often times be just as good and provide the utility of being mobile when needed. If your company is such that many of your IT professionals are on the go or are permitted to work remotely, this is a definitely a feature you will want moving forward.
Most reputable and well-received software offer some form free demo to try out the software before making a capital investment. In addition to checking out the intuitiveness of the software, which is an often-overlooked feature in itself, it will also allow you and your team to see of the tool is compatible with your operating system and other tools. Furthermore, it will also allow you get a feel for a software that potentially, if acquired, you will use almost every day.