Alert Logic Pushes Log Management Into the Cloud

The company's new log management offering, dubbed Alert Logic Log Manager, provides fully indexed searching of all archived log data via a web portal. The data is archived in two separate Alert Logic data centers to ensure redundancy. Users also can view of both raw log data and normalized log data and generate alerts based on customizable rules that detect specific event conditions in the log data, officials at the Houston-based company said.

"Our Automated Audit feature can automatically alert customers when their log data contains evidence of an incident that could possibly compromise their compliance posture," said Chris Smith, vice president of marketing. "It's our way of automatically finding the compliance needle in the log haystack for our customers, and it provides a defensible audit position for them."

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Managing log data is a requirement of various industry and federal regulations, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Delivering the ability as a service will help midsized organizations looking to control costs, Smith said.

Click here to read about a log management product from CrossTec.

Michael Suby, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan, is currently researching the viability of log management as a SAAS (software as a service) offering. Though he said his opinion might change after his research, he said the business formula should work. p>However, he noted that log management as an on-demand service does not have multiple horizontal benefits for being done in the cloud, unlike other security SAAS offerings that focus on controlling, managing, filtering and cleansing traffic coming into business locations from the Internet.

"I am starting out with an opinion that Log Management is a viable SAAS offering as I am seeing SAAS as a delivery method expanding in several security areas," he said. "What I am not as certain about is its viability at the large enterprise level."

Smith however said the company's research showed there was definitely a need.

"Our market research back in early 2006 indicated that all currently available LM [log management] solutions were too difficult and too expensive for a typical mid-sized organization," he said.

"SAAS looked to be the only delivery model that could put LM technology within the reach of the mid-market, so that's the path we chose. Moving the storage needs…of LM from the customer's datacenter to our datacenter was a key to simplifying the deployment and management requirements of the log management solution."

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