Workers Compensation Board of British Columbia Succesfully Streamlines Security Event Management with OpenService's NerveCenter
Westborough, MA - May 19, 2003 - OpenService™, Inc., the leader in Network Security Information Management software, today announced that the Workers' Compensation Board of British Columbia (WCB of BC), in Canada, has tapped NerveCenter's powerful correlation engine to successfully manage and prioritize security events from their intrusion detection systems, firewalls and Web servers. The technology is reducing thousands of alerts per day to as few as 100.
"NerveCenter prioritizes and manages inbound data to determine what, if any, actions need to be taken," said Dan Lazarakis, Technical Specialist, IS Security, WCB of BC, whose agency promotes workplace health and safety, and provides rehabilitation and compensation benefits to workers injured as a result of their employment. "Without NerveCenter, we'd be swamped by an unmanageable number of alerts. Instead, NerveCenter applies intelligence to alerts, tells us which need to be acted on, and allows us to focus our activities accordingly. A compelling advantage for us was NerveCenter's native extensibility, which allowed us to easily customize the solution to match our internal security policies."
NerveCenter is the advanced real-time security event correlation solution powering OpenService's ThreatCenter, which ties together and filters events from multiple security devices to eliminate the false positives that are so common with intrusion detection systems, firewalls and other IT security technologies. As well as NerveCenter, ThreatCenter integrates the SystemWatch security information management agent; the OpenService Management Console, for alerting and configuration management; and ThreatReporter, which provides forensic and management reports.
All security events at the WCB of BC are processed through NerveCenter, which suppresses false alarms and determines which events require action. All events are categorized as high, medium or low alerts, with the resulting action dependent on the category. Events of medium magnitude automatically generate an email alert, while high priority events result in pages. In addition, single events that generate multiple alerts are de-duped, so that security personnel receive just one alert when alarms redundantly repeat. As well as making security more manageable, WCB of BC also realized significant savings by using NerveCenter to proactively detect and replace failing equipment, resulting in higher security and better availability.
"The WCB implementation demonstrates the tremendous versatility of NerveCenter in a security setting," said Phil Hollows, vice president of product marketing for OpenService. "Hundreds of customers are benefiting from NerveCenter in a network management setting, and now its correlation engine is working its magic in security operations too."
About OpenService
OpenService helps global enterprises and government organizations turn deployed security systems into effective enterprise protection. OpenService offers integrated security information management and network fault management applications that provide a layer of intelligence between devices and the risk context for people managing threats. Unlike security information management toolkits that can be expensive and time-consuming to deploy and maintain, OpenService's software deploys in days, not months, and provides a blended view of security and network metrics to effectively manage threats. Visit www.openservice.com for more information.