GLBA News

SenSage Software Provides Cisco MARS Customers Enhanced Log Data Management Solution to Meet Compliance Requirements

(Sept 25, 2007)-- Responding to the growing compliance requirements for quick access to stored data, SenSage, Inc. is offering a complementary solution that provides Cisco Security Monitoring, Analysis and Response System (MARS) customers with a broad set of event data warehouse capabilities.

Many organizations are realizing that collecting and storing log data has become a complex and expensive task that can quickly overwhelm a traditional security information and event management (SIEM) system. A typical enterprise can collect gigabytes of log data per day, which can quickly grow into terabytes over weeks and months. Analyzing log data and executing useful reports to meet auditor requirements can take days or weeks depending on data volume and the complexity of the search.

SenSage offers unique and patented solutions to provide comprehensive event data warehousing for log management and compliance. The company has developed a turnkey log management and compliance solution that complements Cisco MARS capabilities by collecting and correlating event data from hundreds of heterogeneous sources not collected by Cisco MARS. Compliance requirements for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and other regulations require tracking access to sensitive data and changes to user access rights that products such as Cisco MARS do not support. SenSage also effectively replaces the requirement for Cisco MARS customers to license additional Cisco MARS archive servers to support compliance requirements for longer data retention.

"As global regulatory requirements and guidelines become more stringent, the need to quickly and easily access long-term data from sources beyond network infrastructure is no longer optional. Instead, this has become a mainstream requirement for businesses," said Ed Chopskie, vice president of corporate marketing, SenSage. "By combining the strengths of SenSage with Cisco MARS functionality, businesses can cost-effectively achieve the capabilities needed to effectively execute compliance reporting, event correlation and long-term data storage."

Working with dozens of Cisco MARS implementations, SenSage has developed a complementary log management solution for Cisco MARS customers that provides a comprehensive event warehouse to support a broader footprint of source types (including applications and databases), substantially improved data retention, and greatly enhanced data analytics for compliance reporting and user-access monitoring.

PFF Bank and Trust of Rancho Cucamonga, California, part of PFF Bancorp, Inc. , has implemented a SenSage solution with Cisco MARS to deploy real-time security information management to detect internal and external attacks targeting numerous systems and applications, system configurations and user account changes to support numerous compliance initiatives PFF Bank and Trust's Jim Lairmore, information security manager, will conduct a "Lunch and Learn" presentation at the SANS Network Security conference in Las Vegas on September 26, discussing the bank's experiences with this solution and how PFF is now compliant with regulations such as Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), Sarbanes-Oxley and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA).

Event data records -- also known as log data -- are created whenever time-stamped transactions occur in the enterprise IT infrastructure. The retention of log data and the ability for corporations to quickly inspect these records have become vital to businesses, not only for meeting audit readiness and regulatory compliance, but in detecting suspicious activity, insider threats and other security breaches.

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