Importance of Log Management to Businesses

Importance of Log Management to Businesses

Recording and storage of data have improved with advancing of technology over the years. Gone are the days when data was stored manually and sometimes even lost. Security is more profound, and businesses can track their records.

As with the sentries of old who would guard the entrance to a military base and report when there were threats, logs monitoring systems act as electronic guards in the IT systems. Typically, most software and systems, including browsers, operating systems, firewalls, and anti-virus, generate logs. It is crucial to ensure you turn on logs for those systems that do not enable logging automatically.

Important actions that take place in our phones and computers-especially those that occur online-are logged in somewhere in the system. It is, therefore, essential to employ proper log management. Papertrail offers you all-in-one cloud bases log management solution..

Here is the importance of log management to your business.

1. Monitoring Security Issues

In security matters, logs act as red flags to point to raise the alarm at attempted security breach. Systems are prone to security issues, but the generation of logs helps not only to detect them but also to know exactly where the threat is. Regular checking of these logs manually is almost impossible since they are generated continually as you use the system.

The log monitoring system helps to analyze and give a report where events are posing a threat to security. You receive these alerts in the form of emails or messages through your phone. This includes activities such as:

• Password changes
• Unauthorized login
• Exported data
• New user accounts
• Changes in file names and file integrity
• File auditing etc.

2. System Administration

System administrators in the business are tasked with seeing that the configurations are optimal and that the servers and computer systems are running correctly.

Thus, event log management helps them to detect where there are problems and analyze them in real-time. The logs they collect and review show them how a proper system functions; therefore if there are any abnormalities, they can quickly identify them and possibly correct.

System admins can even customize their own rules for generating alerts like failed login attempts and changed passwords, which they can use to look for similar events with matching patterns.

3. Preventing Downtime

Uptime Institute Data Centre Industry Survey found out in 2017 that 90 percent and above of IT professionals are convinced that their management takes outages serious now than they did the previous year.

Log analysis tools help to find problems within them. Your software engineers can then spend more time solving the issues rather than looking for what is wrong in the system and responding to emergencies.

Software engineers spend most of their time trying to keep your site running and looking for potential problems. Predictive alerts tell the engineers when something is wrong and where it is wrong. They give the engineers time to rectify them before they reach the customers. Downtime is bound to occur, but with proper log management, it would cause little to no harm to your business.

4. Tracking employees’ Actions

Whatever your employees are doing on the system is collected and stored by logs. Whether data has been copied from the system, file names and locations changed, or even unauthorized access to data is all recorded by these logs.

This helps the business to avoid their data falling on the wrong hands like those of competitors, through rogue employees. Companies can track such actions on time and take disciplinary action on those found breaching the system security.

5. Threat Remediation

Tracking threats on time helps to remedy them before damage is done. Some of the ways you can respond include:

• Blocking the IP address
• Logging out the user
• Deleting User account or group
• Disabling USB devices
• Shutting down the machine

Conclusion

Without log management, system admins would know something is wrong, but they’d not be sure what it is and therefore end up spending a lot of time. This is like trending in the dark and stumbling on the many facets of IT. This time can be used in more productive ways, and log management helps businesses not to waste much time.

By taking advantage of your log management and analysis functionalities, you will stay ahead of problems and security threats and have explicit knowledge of what is going on in your business.