Retaining Logs for Years is Not a Lofty Goal
Log Retention is a significant part of meeting compliance and ensuring long term security. Worldwide, organizations have been wrestling with the task of defining what events to collect and manage across their enterprise. This has been a thorn in the sides of IT professionals for years because they must balance efficient log collection with log retention limitations. The reason auditing set up, and log retention is such a challenging task, is because there millions of event logs can be generated daily. IT personnel are required to collect, review, and report their findings on a regular basis. Although these requirements seem to be very stringent; reviewing event logs for potential breaches is just a good practice in security. One problem is that a typical server can only store event logs for a few days or in some cases only hours. Even when central logging methods are used, like snare or lasso, the amount of redundant data can be difficult to deal with.
Too much redundant data can pollute log servers. Data pollution is a huge risk that every organization takes when they don’t use smart log solutions that filter out duplicate and redundant data. Data pollution can cause log searching to be extremely painful, reporting to be atrociously inaccurate and ultimately reduce the effectiveness of many security measures.