Acquiring the correct suite of event correlation and analysis tools can make all the difference in the world in minimizing your organization’s exposure to incoming threats and decrease the vulnerability that it will face as it grows in size. If you are tasked with this important purchase, you’ll want to consider a plethora of important features as you conduct your research. In today’s piece, we will talk about some of those features that will be critical in protecting your company’s most valuable data and information.

Essentially, event correlation is a way to make economical and layman sense of a large number of actions and isolating the handful of events that are most critical to the larger data set. Event correlation and analysis tools help get this done by scoping out and analyzing the relationships between all of the events and honing in on the most important.

Whether you are a security analyst or just an IT professional charged with protecting your company’s networks and servers, event correlation and analysis should be a main tool in your arsenal and be actively used. The log correlation contains clues and tidbits about how your entire network communicates both inward and outward so when it comes to troubleshooting or security intelligence, the event correlation log should be your best friend. Almost every security breach has evidence of the breach in the event correlation log but the signs are not obvious. With that said event correlation and the analysis of it could often be extremely complicated and-so looked over even though it’s obvious importance. Event correlation and analysis tools help to bridge that gap of cryptic language and convoluted system language that can often make the difference between a great IT security department and one that is constantly on the phone troubleshooting their own systems!

Security breaches and incoming threat misses ultimately do happen no matter how prepared you think you are as an IT department or company. Event correlation and analysis tools constantly scan your event log data searching for clues that you will need using an automated process. You as the IT security professional need to be asking five things about the breach: where, when, who, what and how. Intelligence with in your event correlation and analysis suite will start asking those questions before your team even knows what hit them.

Using event correlation rules to set up things like alerts and automated log reports is another critical feature to consider when looking for the perfect set of event correlation and analysis tools. These rules will simply alert people how to analyze the log events by automatically correlating the data where appropriate. By being alerted early on certain processes of log data, the right course of action can start place so it’s nipped in the tail early, limiting potential widespread damage and chaos for your IT department. A key to the alert feature is finding one that can notify you or your team in real-time. Most event correlation and analysis tools even offer the ability to set these alerts up custom, ensuring you can be thorough in your protection. Where can you expect these attacks to come from? Spoofing, brute force authentication, web service attacks and client side exploits are just a few culprits to be on the lookout for.

Finding the right event correlation and analysis tools for your custom set of needs can be a tedious process, as it should be given the magnitude of security it can bring you. All of the features mentioned today are just a few to consider in your search. As with most software you purchase in this day and age, it’s always a good idea to look for a free trial version to make sure it’s one you can use adequately.