What Is Log Management and Successful Log Management Tip?

With technology advancements, digital threats are also increasing in organizations. The companies are also trying their best to protect their data from falling into wrong hands. If businesses are not alert the hackers can get their hold on the data in a blink of an eye. Can you imagine how dangerous it can get for your business if they get hold of important files or change the configuration of your devices? The companies are installing new software and hardware into their organization’s IT environment. 

They are leveraging file integrity monitoring (FIM) and security configuration management (SCM) to find the risks and reduce the attack intensity. However for them to reduce the risks they must identify the risks first. But they cannot find the risks if they don’t know what has happened or is happening in their IT environment. This is where log management comes into the picture. 

Before knowing the successful log management tips you must know what log management is. 

What is Log Management?

It is a security control that addresses all network and system logs. The system logs that are generated by the networks or servers create large amounts of data. This data can be used to get better visibility of the IT environment. To simplify the working of logs: Every event in the network will generate data, then that information will be included in the logs, records that are produced by applications, operating systems, and other devices. Businesses must remember that, if they don’t collect, store, and analyze the records properly, their business is open to digital threats/attacks. The five parameters to complete a  log management process are collection, storage, search, correlation, and output. 

Here are a few tips that will help you in successfully managing your logs.

Always know what you are monitoring

As you already know, the reason behind log management is to collect the data and monitor it to find any disparities. It also provides you with necessary insights into the reliability and performance of your services. Simply put, log management is to understand what is happening in your IT environment. So don’t ever jump without a proper plan. If you don’t have an understanding of which data to monitor and end up monitoring all the data, you are wasting your time and resources. So it is important to have an understanding of which data to be monitored first. Don’t try to monitor all your data, it can become a bit hard to manage. Manage your critical services, this way you can also keep an eye on the interrelated and dependent services too. You must find the sweet spot that works for you. As you see, too much data can be hard to analyze and too little data may cause you to overlook critical issues. 

Log Aggregation

Log aggregation will help you in dealing with multiple connected services easily. If there is a request that has passed through multiple services when trying to debug that particular request it can become quite hard to search. However, with log aggregation, you can easily collect your logs making it easy for you to search. Being able to easily search for the relevant logs can save you a lot of time and effort. When you find relevant logs fast, you will find solutions to that problem faster, don’t you agree? Log Aggregation has become highly easy now. There are many log aggregation and management platforms that will help to manage your logs. If you are looking for one such affordable and scalable platform check out this link: https://logit.io/solutions/logging-aggregation. 

Security Matters

Although most organizations understand the importance of data derived from the logs, they forget about the security of these logs. Never compromise the security of your logs because they contain tons of sensitive information relating to your organization. If the data falls into the wrong hands you can imagine the trouble your organization has to deal with. To avoid such situations, your organization must follow Role-based access control (RBAC). Through this, the organization can provide access to the users who can edit, view, share and delete data based on their roles. Also, in case of a breach, it makes it easy to find the blindspot i.e., how an attacker got access to your data. 

Avoid building your log management system

Building a log management system is not an easy task. It truly does take a lot of time, effort, and resources. As the cost increases, naturally, it requires you to put out the required services from the critical systems. There are many off-the-shelf log management solutions available in the market. Also finding a log management system that matches your business needs will be beneficial in the long run as you can ensure optimum performance along with keeping costs down.

Choose a cloud-based log management system

Over time your business will have lots of logs and it can get quite expensive to store these logs. Also, they will be taking up a lot of space too. If a log management system is cloud-based, then one doesn’t have to worry about the space and the storage costs, and most importantly you don’t have to maintain and manage on-premises servers. These log management systems can easily be scaled up reducing the management challenges for you. Lastly, always remember that your log management system should always be able to integrate with your teaming tools. Seamless integration will make it easy for you to manage your work.

Wrapping up 

As you have made it to the end of this article, hope that you have understood more about log management and the tips that will help you in managing it successfully. All the data collected from logs will help your organization find the disparities or blind spots that can make your organization’s security vulnerable. Effective log management can help you in finding the loopholes in your networks or servers and managing them effectively. Find an affordable, cloud-based log management solution that will make it easy for you to manage your organization’s logs.