Sumo Logic Sees IoT Driving SIEM into the Cloud in 2014

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With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), IT organizations will be wrestling with finding a way to first aggregate data and then identify the events that have actual relevance to the business. The problem is that thousands, possibly even millions, of devices will be regularly broadcasting data relating to any number of events. Most IT organizations don’t have the IT infrastructure in place to cope with that volume of data, let alone analyze it.

For that reason, Sumo Logic, a provider of security information event management (SIEM) software that is deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS), is betting that IoT is going to be a boon to cloud computing.

Sanjay Sarathy, chief marketing officer for Sumo Logic, says instead of aggregating all the data in a local data center it will make a lot more sense to first aggregate it and analyze it in the cloud. Via application programming interfaces (APIs) that services such as AWS make available, Sarathy says the cloud is a more convenient point of aggregation. Sumo Logic provides the tools needed to analyze that data, the results of which IT organizations can then opt to share with other applications that are running on AWS or in their local data centers.

Once that machine data is analyzed, organizations then have the option of either permanently storing it or, in accordance with their compliance policies, getting rid of it. According to Sarathy, if the organization decides to keep only the analytics, the cost of IoT over an extended period of time is substantially less because it is not paying to store massive amounts of extraneous machine data.

While IoT may represent trillions of dollars in potential economic growth, many of the practical issues associated with implementing such systems are being overlooked. The simple fact is that all these devices connected to the Internet can do little more than generate massive amounts of log data. It’s not until all that data is analyzed that anything remotely approaching actionable intelligence starts to emerge. The challenge facing IT organizations in 2014 is going to be finding a way to enable that to occur in a way that doesn’t make the cost of providing the capability more expensive than the business value of the information actually being generated.