It’s been a week. A long week. After the most recent Board of Directors meeting, your senior leadership tasked you with finding a security analytics solution. Over the last month, you’ve worked with leadership to develop some basic use cases to determine which solution meets your security and budget needs. You started your research, but everything on the market seems really overwhelming. The Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools have the capabilities you want - and then some.

It’s time again for another meeting with senior leadership. You know that they will ask you the hard questions, like “how do you know that your detection and response times are ‘good enough’?” You think you’re doing a good job securing the organization. You haven’t had a security incident yet. At the same time, you also know that you have no way to prove your approach to security is working. You’re reading your threat intelligence feeds.

It’s mid-morning. You’re scanning the daily news while enjoying a coffee break. You come across yet another headline broadcasting a supply chain data breach. Your heart skips a quick, almost undetectable, beat. You have the technology in the headline in your stack. You set aside your coffee and begin furiously scanning through the overwhelming number of alerts triggered across all your technologies.

It was just another day in paradise. Well, it was as close to paradise as working in IT can be. Then, your boss read about another data breach and started asking questions about how well you’re managing security. Unfortunately, while you know you’re doing the day-to-day work, your documentation has fallen by the wayside. As much as people are loathed to admit it, this is where compliance can help.

Struggling with the evolving cybersecurity threat landscape often means feeling one step behind cybercriminals. Interconnected cloud ecosystems expand your digital footprint, increasing the attack surface. More users, data, and devices connected to your networks mean more monitoring for cyber attacks. Detecting suspicious activity before or during the forensic investigation is how centralized log management supports cybersecurity.

As you’re settling in with your Monday morning coffee, your email pings. The subject line reads, “Documentation Request.” With the internal sigh that only happens on a Monday morning when compliance is about to change your entire to-do list, you remember it’s that time of the year again. You need to pull together the documentation for your external auditor as part of your annual ISO 27000 and ISO 27001 audit.

It’s that time of the year again. The annual and dreaded IT and security audit is ramping up. You just received the documentation list and need to pull everything together. You have too much real work to do, but you need to prove your compliance posture to this outsider. Using log management for compliance monitoring and documentation can make audits less stressful and time-consuming.

The massive shift to remote work makes managing endpoint security more critical and challenging. Yes, people were already using their own devices for work. However, the rise in phishing attacks during the COVID pandemic shows that all endpoint devices are at a higher risk than before. Plus, more companies are moving toward zero-trust security models. For a successful implementation, you need to secure your endpoints.

Even if an organization has developed a governance team, aligning integration decisions with business needs must be incorporated into the zero trust architecture. The company’s business model drives the applications chosen. The senior leadership team needs someone who can translate technology risks and apply them to business risks. For example, security might be an organization’s differentiator.

Not every organization is - or even wants to be - a Fortune 500. Unfortunately, cybercriminals don’t care how big your company is. In fact, they often look to target small and midsize businesses (SMBs) knowing that they might have fewer security resources. You have the same problems that the big companies have, but you also have less money and people. Using centralized log management can give you the security solution you need, at a price you can afford.