Four Ways to Lower Operational Costs – Immediately

In today’s environment, organizations are faced with the challenge of lowering operational costs while still minimizing business risk and meeting regulatory compliance requirements. Our PacketSentry solution helps you meet this very difficult challenge in four specific ways:

Single Tool for Many Applications

PacketSentry delivers monitoring, audit and control over a wide range of applications, including databases, Windows file shares, web, SharePoint, Email (corporate and web-based), NFS, FTP, Novell, and more. It also audits access control changes on Windows file shares and monitors network bandwidth usage by user identity. Installing and maintaining a single solution to do all this is clearly more cost effective than buying point solutions. Just as importantly, having all this data in a single repository makes it far easier to correlate activities across applications and get to the ultimate goal: What is my user community actually doing?

Eliminates “Data Overload” Problem

One of the biggest headaches associated with monitoring internal security is “data overload”. Huge amounts of log data from firewalls, servers, databases, applications and other sources piles up, and it is very hard to efficiency sift through that data to find what you are looking for: “Where the actual business risks are and who’s responsible for them?” PacketSentry works completely differently to other solutions. All data is correlated by identity and application and indexed for rapid searching.  Reporting and polices can be done on an exception basis.  For example, if you know that only members of a specific team have access to a resource, only report or alert on access by anyone who is not a member of that team. You can even chose not to have a report sent at all if there’s no data (in other words, no exceptions to policy). Almost all our customers use this approach when appropriate to keep drastically reduce the information overload problem.

Low Integration and Maintenance Costs

Installing and maintaining PacketSentry is incredibly easy considering the amount of useful information it provides. As a passive solution, there is no need to re-architect the network to insert in-line appliances and no concern about availability or troubleshooting impacts. No server or Active Directory agents means no need to involve server or application support teams, or worry about degraded performance. And because you are not collecting log data from a large number of sources, you don’t have to deal with figuring out why some sources are not providing data, an almost daily occurrence in larger networks. Give us one day, and we’ll install the solution, provide training, and show you how PacketSentry gives you actionable data with next to no ongoing maintenance.

Single Tool for Compliance and General Security

Most companies have totally separate systems and procedures for meeting regulatory compliance, and for general risk mitigation.  However, some objectives set by auditors can double as practical security investments for the enterprise to substantially reduce risks across the organization. Opportunities to cost-effectively scale a hand-full of sensible compliance requirements to the rest of the company are usually overlooked. The challenge is to filter through compliance requirements to identify the activities that scale efficiently and provide impactful risk management with low operational overhead.

Furthermore, there is an opportunity to gain efficiency by proactively standardizing tools and control activities across the organization prior to the start of an audit. Gartner Group discusses the value of such an approach in their report “The Top 10 Risk and Security Audit Findings to Avoid” (document 152216).  Gartner recommends that companies “…develop, in advance of negotiation with auditors, reasonable and appropriate controls for reasonably anticipated risks.” PacketSentry supports efficient data classification, IT administrator and change control monitoring, and user activity tracking for both compliance and general security. An investment in PacketSentry for compliance can also easily be used to mitigate risk company-wide.

Summary

Now more than ever, IT and security organizations are being asked to do more with less. PacketMotion has developed PacketSentry to not just solve the insider threat challenge, but to do it in a way that is operationally viable and cost effective. The four points above are the primary reasons PacketSentry is the best choice for internal security, but they are not the only reasons. Our customers are continuously taking advantage of the flexibility and ease of use of PacketSentry to find new ways to lower risk with a few mouse clicks. Give PacketSentry a try in your network – no risk, immediate results!