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Frequently Asked Questions

What does Prism Microsystems, Inc. do?

What business value does Prism Microsystems, Inc. provide?

How can I receive an ROI report from Prism Microsystems, Inc.?

There are dozens of products in this market; why should I consider EventTracker?

How are your products licensed?

How can I be certain your company meets our business objectives before committing to your product and company?

I don’t see an investor section on your site, are you venture backed?

Are you a software or hardware solution?

What does Prism Microsystems, Inc. do?

Since 1999, our mission has been to provide solutions that enhance the security and reduce the overall cost of operations for our customers. We offer both small and large enterprises integrated solutions for event log management and change and configuration management. Think of our solutions as decision support systems for IT data. We collect, analyze and provide actionable intelligence for the ocean of useful data that the the IT infrastructures generates in the form of log and change data. Prism's award winning line of software solutions are used across a wide range of industries to meet compliance, improve security and enhance the efficiency of IT operations.

What business value does Prism Microsystems, Inc. provide?

  1. Security - Security breaches drain business resources. Even though an organization’s perimeter is protected by firewalls and intrusion detection software, over the last year more than 80% of businesses have had multiple attacks. In addition, a growing security threat is attacks by insiders and a perimeter defense system is useless in preventing these types of attacks. Prism enables defense in depth, where security professionals can monitor not only the perimeter, but the systems and applications that store mission critical data.
  2. Compliance - An organization often must meet regulatory compliance which is an expensive and cumbersome process. Prism Microsystems, Inc. has helped hundreds of businesses meet compliance audits with confidence. Based upon input from large numbers of auditors and customers, the compliance process is built into our EventTracker solution, which is shipped with predefined packages for HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, FISMA, PCI-DSS and others.
  3. Improved Operations – Prism products improve the effectiveness of the IT infrastructure by reducing unplanned outages and enabling helpdesk personnel to resolve issues more quickly. With improved IT services the entire business becomes more effective.  
  4. Solid ROI - Our ROI analysis is based on real customer experience and numbers provided by the U.S. Department of Labor. EventTracker offerings can save up to $100 per server per month in IT costs.

How can I receive an ROI report from Prism Microsystems, Inc.?

If you would like a detailed ROI report, please send us an email at sales@prismMicroSys.com. We are happy to provide ROI analysis reports specially tailored to your company’s environment.

There are dozens of products in this market; why should I consider EventTracker?

It is a confusing market with many vendors claiming to do SIEM, log management, SIM, SEM and many more acronyms. Different vendors have taken different architectural approaches to crafting their solutions as well, and some will map better than others for your specific requirements. In addition, solution costs vary all over the place. Some products are quite inexpensive and cost only $75 to $100 per server, while some products are expensive with a starting price of over $500 per server. Depending on your business requirements, an EventTracker offering is likely able to meet your needs at the budget you have allocated. We feel we offer the most solid value for dollar in the industry.

Obviously the right choice of a product depends on your requirements, and understanding both your environment and your requirements is absolutely critical. A knowledgeable buyer is the best buyer. We also strongly recommend you try the solutions in-house prior to purchasing, as many times a checkbox is not a good indication of how sound the vendor implementation is.

A couple of general thoughts to keep in mind: some low cost solutions (and some of the more expensive ones as well) only solve one part of the puzzle, and are not scalable. Look for products that can be leveraged across your operations, and also provide room to grow as your organization grows. Many of the larger solutions were built for use by large enterprises. They are powerful, but complex, and come with a high TCO when you add in training, implementation, infrastructure costs, etc. It is critical to “right-size” the solution for your business.

IT departments face three challenges: sheer volume of generated data, protection of that data, and the ability to generate intelligence from that data. You will find that EventTracker effectively meets all three challenges. High end products often require an intense amount of training and months of configuration tuning before you see any benefits. Low cost products may work during the evaluation period but will not be reliable against the volume of data generated by operational servers. Please note that a dozen servers with two domain controllers and few firewalls can easily generate over five million events each day. EventTracker solutions are quick to bring into production and are highly scalable. Once you have consolidated event and configuration data to a central server, you will have the ability to generate business intelligence in a timely fashion to meet security and/or compliance as well as day-to-day operational needs. The biggest strength of EventTracker is an embedded knowledge base and rules to manipulate data and generate the necessary data for enterprise-wide decision making.

We have architected EventTracker to be the best of both worlds. Low TCO, but with a scalable infrastructure to grow as you grow. Of course, you need to justify the cost of deployment, but you should also analyze and substantiate how much it will save. What is the ROI? Our analysis and customer experience indicates that EventTracker solutions will not only enhance security and reduce the pain of meeting compliance, but they will help save your organization up to $100 per server per month. If you want a detailed ROI report, please send us an email at sales@prismMicroSys.com and we will be happy to provide you an ROI analysis report specially tailored to your company’s environment.

How are your products licensed?

EventTracker solutions are licensed in a simple and straightforward manner. We license on a per-managed object basis. You pay for the number of devices you are monitoring. That's it. There are no hidden costs for management servers or database licenses. Everything is included in the managed object price. This approach offers several advantages. The first is a predictable pricing model. Some other solutions price on volume, but most customers we have found don't really understand just how much volume their systems are generating. Guess wrong and you either get a solution that is undersized where performance is a constraint, or worse, you quickly find you need to purchase another system, or alternately, you over-estimate and you spend a lot of money on excess capacity that sits idle. The EventTracker model is a pay-go system - pay for what you need, when you need it.

How can I be certain your company meets our business objectives before committing to your product and company?

We understand your concerns and that is why we urge prospects to try our products in their organizations prior to purchase. Many of our happiest customers had similar concerns when they began relationships with us. We also want to make sure that we meet your business objectives before you commit to us. If you need help getting the software deployed in a meaningful test environment, Prism has dedicated trial support engineers to help you. If our software does not make it into production we have failed in our commitment to you, our customer.

I don’t see an investor section on your site, are you venture backed?

No, we are privately held and profitable, and have a stable and expanding customer base. We actually think that not having venture gives us an advantage and increases our long term viability. It is easy to spend $2 to make a dollar – until the funding runs out! Our model is based around being viable now, not at some point in the distant future. It prevents bad habits from developing.

Are you a software or hardware solution?

We offer 100% software solutions and run on industry standard Microsoft operating systems. Most of our customers are comfortable with their hardware suppliers, comfortable with Windows, and prefer to deploy and maintain their machines themselves. This allows them to take advantage of the best possible offerings when it comes to server purchase. Software also provides a more linear pricing model –if you outgrow an appliance you need another fairly expensive appliance. With software, however, you can add more memory, split the processing over multiple machines and quickly adapt to a growing infrastructure. This helps minimize customer costs. EventTracker products are easily deployed in virtual environments and in cloud-based solutions such as Amazon EC2.

One of the arguments that we hear from appliance vendors is that appliance configuration is easier – this is a fallacy. While it might save you a few minutes plugging in an appliance rather than installing software, the deployment time is in configuring the devices to send data to the application. This is unaffected by the hardware/software equation. One thing to think about - if your appliance fails on a Friday night, sparing may be impossible unless you already had an idling spare appliance; you cannot simply move the software to another machine nor fire up another VM, nor can you pop out to your local Best Buy for a replacement appliance.