Protecting Intellectual Assets is Mandatory
Over the last few years, data auditing has become a major focal point for businesses for two main reasons: data breaches and compliance requirements. Monitoring and tracking access to data assets, within large data centers, can be very difficult. Assets are located on a variety of platforms and file servers across the enterprise. Data assets range from company intellectual property to customer private data.
- Enterprise Intellectual Asset Protection
- Auditing & Monitoring Data Assets
- The Challenges of Auditing Data Access
- The Solution: LogClarity® Server Edition
- Why the LogClarity® Solution?
Enterprise Data Asset Protection Overview
Identity theft is on the rise, and cannot be ignored
Protecting customer data has become a necessity, not only to meet compliance requirements, but to solidify customer confidence. Data can be stored inside file servers or relational databases. Being able to audit, monitor, and protect data, inside and outside databases, is a serious goal for organizations today.
According to a recent survey by Forrester, over a thousand decision makers were asked what their most important business objective was for 2008. 82% responded that “protection of customer data” was their number one objective. Research conducted by other sources found that DBAs are spending less than 7% of their time on security. Compliance requirements also state that organizations must use discretion by setting up separation of duties (SOD) procedures.
This clearly means that someone other than the DBAs should be monitoring activity on the databases. This can be a significant problem if security teams are not database savvy. Solutions that can solve the security aspects of database activity monitoring must be security driven without forcing users to be completely database literate.
Data Asset Compliance Legislation
Importance of Customer Confidence
Customer confidence is the lifeblood of every company. Protecting their interests and maintaining their loyalty is critical. A large portion of critical customer private information is contained inside database servers. All compliance standards have a unifying requirement which is the protection and monitoring of critical information. Other intellectual assets are contained on File Servers across the enterprise. According to the compliance legislation below, data must be audited, monitored, and protected from abuse.
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These mandates are very specific in terms of the repercussions to the company or institution that houses the confidential information. If a breach of security has occurred and confidential information was compromised or stolen, the organization that had the breach must disclose to the parties affected. Any breach of private data can negatively affect the organization’s credibility with their customers and the general public.
Enterprise Intellectual Asset Protection
Data Breaches are on the Rise
Data theft is a huge epidemic that is spreading like wild fire. Data breaches have dramatically increased over the last several years. It is not just external attacks that organizations must defend against. Malicious insiders who are knowledgeable and determined to take confidential business data and intellectual assets for financial gain are also huge risks.
Over 50% of data breaches in 2007 were caused by internal users. Rogue techniques were used by insiders to pilfer data for personal gain. This means that organizations must monitor all user access to critical data assets, and have powerful response measures in place.
Auditing & Monitoring Data Assets
Protecting Data Theft Requires Monitoring
One of the major responsibilities of every security administrator is to protect the enterprise from malicious attempts to steal or damage proprietary company information, trade secrets, and data. There is more at stake than meeting compliance requirements. Loss of reputation and competitive advantage in the marketplace are also at risk. The potential negative outcomes are big motivating factors for implementing data security solutions.
File servers are a huge part of any company infrastructure and can be high profile targets for anyone looking to capitalize on an opportunity to access and take advantage of any weakness in the security infrastructure.
The Challenges of Auditing Data Access
The Difficult Hurdles Facing Security Professionals
The most efficient way to quickly identify risk to the corporate data assets is to log and monitor it. All File servers have ways to audit access to data. On both UNIX and Windows file server, file (object) access can be enabled on critical servers to accomplish this goal.
One major problem with enabling auditing of all file (object) access events is, that it can cause serious problems with the server’s performance. Disk space availability is another factor, in terms of storage capacity needs for archiving. Being savvy setting up file (object) access logging by being very selective about which files and folders need to be audited is important. Unfortunately, it will take a lot more than smart file/directory auditing choices to overcome data security hurdles.
Another serious problem that occurs when enabling file (object) access auditing (objects) is, large quantities of redundant copies of file access events occur, every time a file gets read, edited or deleted. This happens because Microsoft didn’t create the auditing system for the purpose of regular users to read them. The auditing system was originally built for Microsoft’s purposes of debugging the operating system itself.
These event logs are also very difficult to search through with event viewer or other common regular expression search methods for two reasons. The first reason is: because they all have the same event ID: event ID 560. The second reason is: each event log’s Description Field is cryptic and non-standard. The combination of redundant event logs, poor event grouping (i.e. Event ID 560), and hard-to-decipher Description Fields, can be very challenging to overcome.
The Solution: LogClarity® Server Edition
Protecting Intellectual Property is Critical
LogClarity® Server Edition is an agent-based, intelligent log management solution that comes pre-built with research-based event log definitions for all the file (object) Access event logs. The magic of the LogClarity® Server Edition is that it automatically translates the file (object) access events into understandable actions. This is only possible by implementing the Log Fidelity’s event log research into the LogClarity® agents.
Why LogClarity® Solution?
The Logical Choice for Log Management
Other log management solutions don’t perform any analysis of event logs at all. They simply collect them all to a central log server. This can be very difficult to use for a number of reasons. The duplicate data can cause inaccurate reports and too many event log results during data mining activity searches. It can also cause serious data pollution and poor log retention.
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