Logs that make auditors happy

Regulated industries are under constant scrutiny to comply with one mandate after another. The participants in payment card industry have to not only take significant steps to ensure the safety of cardholder data but must also demonstrate their compliance on an ongoing basis to a team of auditors. The handling of patient healthcare records is under similar scrutiny in the United States by way of HIPAA regulations. Other mandates confront the IT departments of many other industries, whether it's FISMA for the US federal government, NERC for the utilities industry, or SOX for public corporations.

One cornerstone of compliance for nearly all of these disparate regulations and mandates is log management, which refers to the system-wide collection, storage, correlation, and analysis of computer system logs. The ability to monitor which individuals gained access to which systems, and to accurately determine what commands were issued by the user, is imperative to maintaining and demonstrating the integrity of the environment.

Virtualization presents an interesting dilemma for many organizations. Because the technology is relatively new, some organizations and some auditors are often unclear about when and where virtualization may be appropriately deployed without triggering a red flag during the audit process. At the same time, the value proposition to virtualize infrastructure is so strong that it seems counterintuitive to omit it from any part of the environment. HyTrust enables organizations to safely bridge this divide, providing the security, visibility, accountability and control to confidently virtualize systems that come under an auditor's scrutiny.

HyTrust Appliance provides granular, user-specific, virtual infrastructure access log records that can be used for regulatory compliance, troubleshooting, and forensic analysis. The solution offers a high level of visibility into the state of virtual infrastructure. The logs can be utilized for monitoring, alerting, and reporting, based on changes over time. HyTrust Appliance integrates seamlessly with all major log management and monitoring solutions via syslog and secure syslog. The solution enables quick and easy access to logs without the need for special connectors, manual integration, or disparate log aggregation and correlation systems.