BIG DATA

Businesses are drowning in a sea of audit log data from their IT systems, which must be tracked to mitigate the risks of security threats, legal exposure and regulatory compliance. Vertica is working with Italian IT security specialist, Integra, to offer these businesses the world's fastest log warehouse for managing never-ending volumes of audit data. 

Integra has integrated the Vertica Analytic Database into its iknoplex Log Manager (ILM). The technology enables businesses to create a specialized data warehouse to instantly drill down through all log data and analyze it insightfully. Until now, businesses could only analyze a smaller subset of log data because their databases couldn't handle the massive data volumes that their systems generated. 

ILM solves this performance and scalability problem using Vertica's column-oriented, MPP database to handle the massive analytic workloads. With its strong data compression and unique parallel processing architecture, the Vertica Analytic Database has enabled Integra to deliver the fastest data warehouse infrastructure for high-volume log data currently on the market. 

The Vertica-based solution from Integra is particularly critical for banks and institutions that face regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, PCI DSS, FISMA, HIPAA, GLBA and European privacy laws. They must consolidate audit log data for long retention periods, and make it instantly available to compliance, fraud management, threat management and incident response applications. 

According to Yann Bongiovanni, Integra's CTO, aggregating, monitoring and analyzing the overwhelming amount of audit logs is an enormous problem for risk-averse companies. "They can't analyze what they can't see, and they can't see sufficient data with traditional technologies. The problem could only be solved with modern data center innovations such as grid-based computing, parallel processing and columnar databases. After evaluating a number of offerings, such as Sensage, we decided to embed Vertica because it is generations ahead in product development, and far outperformed the competition," he said. 

How it works
ILM collects, normalizes, enriches and archives all the log and audit data, making it available to a variety of business intelligence and reporting applications. To manage the extraordinarily large data volumes while delivering blazingly fast query performance, the Vertica-enabled ILM data warehouse operates in a cluster of small industry-standard servers, delivering supercomputing performance at an affordable cost. 

Data acquisition, processing, loading and querying utilize parallel processing to exploit the power of the multiprocessor cluster hardware, which is critical since a single cluster can acquire hundreds of terabytes per month of uncompressed log data. Vertica's pioneering data compression reduces storage requirements by as much as 90 percent while delivering query results from the data 50 to 200 times faster than other databases.

"Audit log data provides a complete record of access, activity and configuration changes to IT systems and applications. But the exponential growth of this data is outpacing organizations' ability to make use of it, putting them at risk of security breaches, network downtime or regulatory non-compliance. So it's no surprise that Integra's customers include some of Europe's largest banks. ILM's high performance, scalability and modern data center innovation is critical to keeping their organization safe and operational," said David Menninger, Vertica's vice president of product management and marketing.