Being in charge of protecting your company from the ever growing list of incoming online threats is no small task and one that is a constant worry of IT professionals everywhere. Obtaining event correlation software can limit your exposure and decrease your company’s vulnerability to incoming attacks in a number of ways. From accelerating the incident’s response time and detecting the threat in near real time, the right event correlation software will prove to be a huge asset in addition to the arsenal of tools you are already using. In today’s article we take a look at some of the features to consider when picking the best software to fit your needs and protect your company’s most important information.

One of the most important features to consider when looking for your software is a software that has an alarms or alert feature that acts in real time to alert you of attacks and potential breaches in security. You not only want to get alerted when you’re under attack, but you want to understand how your assets are being attacked and find out who’s doing it. The more detailed information you can get about the attack the better; such as attacker intent, specific remediation guidance or detailed malicious actor information. It’s important while thinking about all of this, to ensure that the alerts and alarms you will have set up can be transmitted in real-time. As with threats of any kind, the faster you are able to be aware of them and neutralize them the less damage they will wreck on your company.

An incident over your networks or servers will inevitably happen. When it does it’s critical to be able to determine five major things about the attack; how, what, who, when and where. Since your event log data doesn’t have all the clues your team will need, an automated event correlation feature can be very useful. Instead of your already busy IT team spending their day’s researching and investigating every incident, an automation feature automatically produces a report with all of the aforementioned details. By having this threat intelligence feature within your event correlation software, your team can focus finding solutions to the attacks and become smarter on how to prevent more in the future.

Furthering the importance of an alert type feature for your event correlation software, many of the event correlation software available on the market today offer a feature that alerts you to known “bad actors” that may be targeting your network, such as known malicious IP addresses, various malware or domains. All of this data will be listed in your log files and a good event correlation software will be able to identify them and display them to you, once again, in real time being the key. Custom rules is a feature that allows you to detect expected specific incoming attacks, and ignore or place less emphasis on others. Some of the most common attacks to consider if you are setting up custom rules are web service attacks, policy violations, spoofing, brute force authentication and client side exploits.

The features mentioned above are just examples of a few to consider when making the investment into a event correlation software for your company. As with any software you are thinking about making an investment in, it’s important to consider not only is it a great fit for you, but your team as well. One way to confirm the overall intuitiveness of software is to download a free trial version of it. This will not only allow you to see if the software is one you can pick up and train your team on easily, but also see if it is compatible with the litany of other software you use.