Keeping information secure

The Canadian airline WestJet has implemented a new enterprise security management system. Security Manager from Intellitactics will be used to automate processes to speed the resolution of security incidents and to simplify reporting for audit and decision support.

The solution will be integrated with WestJet's security management architecture to centralize the logging of network activity and to automate monitoring and analysis of events from security devices to protect information assets. With real-time access to prioritized alerts, WestJet can react immediately to incidents posing the greatest risk to the organization, according to a recent press release from Intellitactics.

Bruce Elliott, WestJet's senior manager of IT security, says, "WestJet has been experiencing tremendous growth, which has driven the need for increased investments in security technology. We spent the past five years building out our infrastructure, installing multilayer firewalls and bringing our anti-virus, anti-spam and intrusion detection software up-to-date. We are now running in the region of 700 servers in three different locations.

"Between our security applications, e-mail, Windows applications, servers and network traffic, we can easily generate between 60 to 80 MB of data a day. Ninety percent of data generated is what we call noise. What I worry about is the 10 percent that has the potential to cause tremendous damage to the business. Without an automated solution, it's impossible to collect this data from the various sources, analyze the events and then escalate the high-impact alerts--the important 10 percent--in order to take action.

Elliott continues, "In seeking a security information and event management solution, we had certain requirements that the system had to meet. Because we have a layered, diverse and complex security architecture, the solution had to work with existing systems and deliver information in real time without adding more complexity. We selected Security Manager because its real-time event monitoring and ability to quickly make sense of alerts and incidents provided the value we were looking for. With it we can meet our security challenges head-on and dramatically simplify the complexity of running our security operations."