We want to take this opportunity to invite you to meet the AccelOps team at the 2011 Gartner Data Center Conference, Dec 5-8 at Booth 49 and learn more about our technology, products and customer successes.

Executives Available for Onsite Face-to-Face Meetings:

Mahesh Kumar, VP of Marketing, manages product management, product marketing, analyst and public relations, marketing communications, and channel marketing.
Topics of Discussion: Company background, products, pricing, delivery models, customer examples and references

Partha Bhattacharya, Co-Founder, CTO and VP of Engineering, leads technology innovation and engineering at AccelOps.
Topics of Discussion: Product Architecture and Technology

Joe Wilkinson, Director of Sales, is responsible for all sales in the western US. He manages both direct sales and relationships with channel partners in the western US.
Topics of Discussion: Products, Pricing, POCs, Customer references

AccelOps is a silver sponsor of the conference.

While the HP acquisition supports the value of SIEM, it also points out the potential downside of a SIEM-only business model. The IT environment is flattening not only from an infrastructure perspective but from an operational perspective. CIO’s are faced with the challenge of delivering against SLA’s, mitigating risk and reducing costs in the face of increasing complexity due to virtualization, cloud computing, regulation, etc. How can SIEM pure plays address these challenges? How do IT ops pure plays meet these challenges?

The reality is that neither type of company can fully satisfy the market need. This is what HP recognized as they acquired ArcSight. However, what HP will quickly realize is that simply buying the parts and lumping them into the same portfolio will not easily meet the market needs, other than from a messaging perspective. The holistic, end-to-end approach where IT ops and security work together from a common platform requires a modern, web 2.0 architecture.

We recognized these problems and gaps in thinking and technology three years ago. This was the genesis of AccelOps.

When looking at event log management solutions, flexibility and multi-tasking are essential in today’s IT environment. Unless you want to reinvent your log management system each time your organization grows and changes, look for a multi-tier and flexible program that will give you the most bang for your budget.

A good place to start is to look at the archiving system of your log management system. A good system should gather log data automatically, and store it securely and centrally for easy retrieval. Keep in mind that your industry may make it imperative that you store log data over a long period of time, and to protect yourself legally you may want to store information longer than that, so storage capability and security are paramount.

Secondly, you will want to consider event analysis capabilities of your event log management system. Once the system gathers data, what then? Data is useless if it is captured on a secure server and never looked at again. Look for a system that helps with audit compliance but which goes above and beyond this function. A good event log management solution helps you investigate, report, and correlate events so that you can actually look at all that data yourself and make your organization work better.

You will want your event log management system to also have a good alarm system. By “good” we mean a system that lets you define specific alarm events and then notifies you when those events occur – in real time. The system should do this with minimal “false alarms” and without overlooking any defined events.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), such as AccelOps, helps organizations comply with an increasingly complex set of requirements. In recent years, security policies at many organizations have tightened even while compliance requirements across the country and across industries have become complex and penalties for non-compliance have become harsher.  A good SIEM solution helps organizations meet security and compliance regulations, whether those requirements are internal or external. More importantly, a good SIEM solution helps companies see what is happening both outside and inside their network, so that any potential issues and problems can be resolved before they really become problems.

Today’s generation of SIEM solutions, such as AccelOps, makes compliance simpler by providing organizations with multi-function management solutions from a single application. Organizations are increasingly using their SIEM solutions to make compliance simpler, to enhance security, to reduce security threats, and to make network and IT operations more efficient. Obviously, today’s SIEM management solutions are not just about compliance; they are about making your organization work better and safer. Today’s SIEM management solutions secure logs, and then automatically collect, alert, analyze, audit, and report information based on the parameters and definitions you set.

There seems to be an almost unlimited number of options out there when it comes to log management solutions. Choosing the right option for your organization can seem daunting. However, it becomes less so when you consider that you need your log management system to do three things. First, it must help you meet compliance requirement (both across your industry and internally). Second, it must make your organization operate more effectively. Finally, it must improve security in your organization. What shape or look your solution takes is less important than the fact that it meets these three basic requirements.

Of course, many of today’s organizations demand much more than this type of bare-bones log management solution. Today, most companies are combining change management solutions with configuration management, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and log management systems. Combining all these elements in one powerful solution helps improve security as well as efficiency. It also helps companies gain better control over IT changes and important network or system events. Unless you are running a very small organization, these multi-tier solutions make sense. At the very least, make sure that any log management solution can grow with your organization and can eventually work seamlessly with any SIEM, configuration management, change management, and other system you add.

The accelOps platform provides not only log management solution but also asset identification, baseline options, report and audit capabilities, alerts, incident management solutions, and forensic analyses, making the complete platform a very comprehensive IT solution for just about any organization. The goal of the accelOps platform is simple: save your organization money while streamlining your IT data collection and actionable compliance to boost your gains. With power features and customizable options, the accelOps platform can deliver, no matter what the size or needs of your organization.

The AccelOps log management features are especially impressive. The accelOps platform gathers and securely stores all the data you need from any enterprise IP device you choose. There is no data reduction, filtering, or normalizing, so that your team can always have access to the data it needs in its most complete format. The accelOps log management feature gathers everything you need – from operations information to security events and network events.

The accelOps log management feature can help you enhance cost savings, compliance, and security. Security alerts and reports allow you to ensure that your security is up to standard while reports create the documentation you need for your security or compliance team professionals. Thanks to the simple to use accelOps platform, there is no need for agents or DBA resources, saving you money.

A network configuration management system is a set of tools that allows you to keep track of changes made to network devices. In today’s IT world, where changes are contestant as companies work to expand and keep up with demand (not to mention changing technology), network configuration management has become essential. A network configuration management system allows you to make and undo needed device changes and allows IT professionals to work together on the same system without undoing each other’s work or puzzling over different changes.

A network configuration management system also allows you to enforce policy and allows companies to apply the same configuration to multiple network devices as needed. For example, if you are buying plenty of new network components and devices, a good network configuration management helps you keep track of all your current configurations so that you can apply them to your new purchases as well. Best of all, by helping you maintain control of network devices, network configuration management allows you to control your network and prevent any problems caused by random device changes. This helps increase the stability of your network.

Network configuration management is a set of tools that allow IT professionals and team leaders to manage the changes made to network devices. Network configuration management can help you control devices such as routers and switches, so that you can change router configurations, for example, at will, and even return to earlier configurations if needed. Network configuration management keep track of all changes, so that you can always remember the changes that have been made to your network devices, when the changes were made, and even why. This helps prevent the guesswork needed if you decide you need to undo changes.

In companies with multiple engineers or IT professionals, network configuration management is essential to allow IT professionals to work together and to see what other professionals have done with a system. This helps prevent costly communication breakdown. With a good network configuration management system, your IT professionals can see what changes have been made to the network by engineers or other IT professionals, so if changes or troubleshooting need to happen, your professionals can see exactly what changes were made and when.