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New data logging service allows actionable cybersecurity insights
Thu, 28th Sep 2017
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Palo Alto Networks has released its new cloud-based Logging Service, enabling customers to amass large amounts of their own data.

According to the next-gen security company, this new service is designed for machine learning and advanced analytics in order to correlate potential threats and prevent successful cyber breaches – of which there have been many of late.

There is no doubt that cybersecurity products produce a mass of valuable data every day that can be used to surface evasive threats.

However, Palo Alto Networks argues traditional hardware-based log collection comes with admin overhead and scale limitations that make this useful data effectively unwieldy or unavailable.

To make use of stored logs across various applications, complex integrations are often required which makes it a difficult process to carry out cross-product workflows and generate correlated insights.

“The operational overhead of managing hardware to collect logs means that today's organisations are unable to efficiently collect large amounts of data, with many being unable to action the data they do collect,” says Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research.

“With Palo Alto Networks Logging Service, organisations can deploy quickly, share information between different applications and sensors, and scale their capacity on a dime, empowering them with enhanced capabilities to spot and prevent successful cyberattacks.

The Palo Alto Networks Logging Service essentially enables organisations to store, process and analyse as much log data as possible to obtain comprehensive visibility across their infrastructure and convert their data into actionable insights.

According to Palo Alto Networks, the service provides a centralised and scalable logging infrastructure without operational overhead, allowing customers to collect log data without local compute and storage limitations.

“As the foundation for the forthcoming Palo Alto Networks Application Framework, Logging Service delivers both scale and advanced functionality for organisations of any size,” says Lee Klarich, chief product officer at Palo Alto Networks.

“This new offering significantly reduces the complexity and economics of log management, enabling customers to make better correlations, and effectively respond to and prevent successful cyberattacks.

The cloud-based service from Palo Alto essentially changes the economics of collecting log data, making it affordable to collect and store as much data as required.