"SenSage is the only company that we are aware of that offers such an event warehousing solution and it is one that we think companies would do well to investigate"
Philip Howard, Research Director, Bloor Research
SenSage offers something new to the world of data management - the Event Data Warehouse. SenSage products consist of a patented, purpose-built Event Data Warehouse and targeted, pre-packaged Solutions that provide actionable results at a fraction of the cost of traditional data warehouse solutions and offer far superior analysis and scalability when compared to security and log management point solutions.
Event Data is Everywhere
Event data, sometimes referred to as an "audit trail" or "system of record", is a set of chronologically sequenced data records that capture information about an event. Driven by changes in security threats, compliance mandates, and risk management initiatives, organizations are collecting event data from multiple sources, storing it online longer, and analyzing it more frequently. Examples of event data include:
- Network and security devices
- Physical access systems
- Identity management systems
- Workstations, servers, and operating systems
- Database activity
- Enterprise applications - 3rd party and in-house
- Banking transactions such as online, ATM and debit card use
- Historical prices of stocks and other instruments
- Telco call detail records (CDRs)
- Internet protocol detail records (IPDRs) of web based access and transactions
- Updates to shipping status in RFID records
- Email, Windows, network and other systems management activity events
- Manufacturing sensor data
Event Data is Important
Sophisticated, long term analysis of event data is the key to addressing emerging security threats, compliance mandates, and a host of risk management initiatives. Why? First, compliance mandates require firms to retain and analyze event data for up to seven years. As a result, nearly every organization is required to create secure, centralized log and event data repositories. Second, event data is the fingerprint of internet and corporate system activity and is critical to preventing and minimizing corporate security threats. Recent independent reports peg the cost of stolen corporate data for a mid-sized corporation at $6.6M per incident and rising. Preventing and minimizing these threats requires precise analysis of multiple, complex data sources in real-time and, especially, over long time frames. Organizations that are not leveraging log and event data to make strategic decisions are putting their firms at risk.
Unique Challenges of Managing Event Data
For many organizations, event data is their fastest growing data and, often, their single largest data store. Even for small firms, it's common to generate over a terabyte a day. For most, the first place to turn for help is to legacy data management suppliers. Unfortunately, traditional data management systems were built for transactional data not event data. The requirements to manage event data are different:
- Data - Log and event data can never be updated or changed
- Collection - Difficult due to hundreds of data formats and dispersed endpoints
- Analysis - Data must be analyzed in real-time and over extremely long frames
- Users - Typically few users but they need access to years of data
- Queries - Often ad hoc, time-sensitive, and dispersed across huge data sets
- Volume - Enormous volumes of data creation and collection
Attempts to use traditional data management systems to manage event data often lead to dramatically higher costs and complexity. Some vendors still try to convince customers that a single enterprise data warehouse is the correct approach, forcing them to over spend and endure extremely long implementation cycles. Security vendors espouse the benefits of legacy log management and SIEM tools to manage event data. Unfortunately, these point solutions don't scale, are difficult to customize, and often can't address many of the emerging use cases of event data management. SenSage believes both of these strategies are wrong. Effective management of event data is achieved through a single enterprise approach that provides true business intelligence, rapid delivery, scale, and targeted business solutions.
The Event Data Warehouse
An Event Data Warehouse is purpose-built to provide actionable results from massive amounts of log and event data. Powerful features and benefits include:
- An integrated solution containing data collection (ETL), storage and business intelligence analytics components
- Data can be easily collected (without agents) from any source - databases, applications, logs.
- Solution analytics including dashboards, alerts, summary and trending reports provide automatic visibility to issues. From any of these, detailed investigations and ad hoc queries into terabytes of data is a click away.
- Data storage capabilities, built on a patented columnar database, provide a 40:1 compression advantage vs. traditional databases
- Advanced query techniques - data mining vs. "Google-like" search
- A clustered share-nothing architecture that allows for a deployment on inexpensive commodity hardware and incremental MPP scaling as data and query volume expand without an upgrade of the current environment
- Open access from a number of methods including SQL, Perl DBI, and JDBC.
- Significantly lower TCO - 10:1 advantage in up front costs and ongoing administrator/DBA support costs
Click here for more information on SenSage Event Data Warehouse Solutions.