Meanwhile, I recently talked with James Perry, the Information Security Officer at the University of Tennessee about his use of log management. His department has been using ArcSight Logger since July 2008, and he’s still finding interesting use cases. Here’s a look at some of them and how his organization is benefiting from log management.

At the same time, the environment can’t be a free-for-all. The university network serves 159 merchants such as bookstores, coffee shops and other sales operations. This means there is a requirement for PCI compliance. Two of the campuses work with medical data. That means HIPAA compliance. There’s financial data, meaning GLBA compliance, and so on. As you can see, the need to log and monitor all activities for compliance purposes was a big driving factor in the university acquiring a log management product. What’s more, like most organizations today, the university is experiencing budget cuts, so Perry was forced to improve security and operations with fewer resources. Log management has helped to achieve the latter objective as well.