How Durham County Council instantly saved
50% cost, by choosing Logpoint

Durham County Council decided to replace their SIEM solution following serious data losses by the previous system. This, compounded by the vendor’s high cost, led the team to re-evaluate their selection. After careful evaluation, the Durham County Council replaced its solution with Logpoint.

Background

Durham County Council (United Kingdom) is a local government organization that employs 18,000 people and represents a population of more than 500,000. The capital funding for SIEM is primarily justified by the council’s extensive compliance burden, and as a local authority that holds public data and collects revenue, the Durham County Council is subject to multiple compliance and accreditation requirements, including PSN, NHS IG Toolkit, HSCIC, PCI-DSS and BACS.

The outstanding offering – in terms of features, look and price – was Logpoint.

Paul Woods, Information Security Officer,

Durham County Council

The solution

As a result of replacing their solution with Logpoint they’ve experienced many clear ROI benefits, including reduced cost, increased productivity, wider team use, and wider system use

Logpoint’s straightforward, predictable pricing model saved Durham almost 50%, as compared to the previous vendor. Logpoint’s simpler, per-node pricing structure has allows them to more widely deploy the solution and ingest a greater amount of data. This expands the contextual awareness that the SIEM offers, generating further value from the council’s investment.

Access to the SIEM solution was previously restricted to only two members of the technical services team, tying up much of their time. The simple pricing structure and ease of use that Logpoint offers means that the system opened up to other ICT areas, including the ICT service desk. The service desk can now perform their own searches, such as following up on virus alerts, tracing them back to the originating PC and identifying the alert trigger. This empowers them to contain the virus threat. More than 140 distinct devices are now configured to Logpoint, providing a more comprehensive contextual overview for the IT team. Durham County Council plans to incorporate even more systems into the SIEM and become even more proactive thanks to the notifications and updates Logpoint provides.

Results

The main benefits of Logpoint to Durham County Council:

  • Compliance reporting automated, providing the info needed rapidly and comprehensively
  • Much more cost effective than the last SIEM
  • Data loss issue resolved
  • Greater variety of systems integrated, giving more extensive reporting context
  • Extended to a far greater number of users in the ICT team, creating time efficiencies and freeing team members up

Paul Woods, information security officer, lists his favorite Logpoint features

  • Customizable searches in everyday English
  • Easy-to-use language, which is the same language for customer alerts and reports
  • Clean, good-looking dashboards that get better with every upgrade
  • The ease of getting logs loaded into Logpoint
  • The ability to write custom signatures
  • Log tearing – the ability to hold some data online and some on secondary storage that takes slightly longer to get info from
  • Customer support: “Excellent, simply excellent!”