Security is more important for businesses now than ever before. Hacks and data breaches are on the rise in recent years, and can cost your company millions of dollars. If your data, or the data of your customers is compromised, it can hurt the credibility of your company as well.
There are several different things you can do to up the security of your business. This includes using strong passwords, having access control and training your employees well. However, one of the best things for the security of your company is to manage logs.
Log management is all about dealing with the thousands of log messages that your computer or software produces, which can be incredibly important to the security of your overall operation. Whether you are curious about what is free log management tools, or you want to learn about the benefits of log management, this article is for you. Without any further ado, let’s look at what log management is and how to choose the right tools.
What is Log Management?
To understand log management, you need to understand what logs are. Logs are a time-stamped documentation of events relevant to your computer, software or program. They are automatically produced and can give you an inside look at all issues, events, sign-ins, and errors within your application or software.
There are thousands of these produced, so searching through them manually to find a specific event can be cumbersome. As a result, many companies will utilize log management. Log management is all about storing, analyzing, organizing and eventually disposing of these logs. Log management is helpful to businesses of all sizes, and there are many tools out there to automate many of the processes relating to log management.
What are the Benefits of Log Management?
So just how does log management help security? Well, monitoring and analyzing system events can help you learn whenever an error or event has taken place. However, not only will you know that an issue, breach or other security event has taken place, but you will also be able to find it. Once you have identified the issues, you can begin to fix it. If you are not effectively managing your logs, even finding the right event in the first place could prove difficult.
Utilizing some type of automatic log management solution will allow you to deal with potential security issues as quickly as possible, before they affect the end user. In some cases, you may even be able to identify or spot and issue before it actually occurs.
However, security is only one of the benefits of log management. Another great benefit is that it can assist with compliance. There are many regulators out there around the world that look to audit logs so if your logs aren’t managed correctly, you might not be compliant. Other benefits of log management include gathering valuable data, tracking the actions of some employees and viewing related analytics.
How to Choose the Right Log Management Tools?
Earlier we mentioned that there are some tools that can assist with automating and optimizing log management. But with so many out there, how are you supposed to choose which one your business will use? The first thing you need to do is to identify your needs. These log analysis tools can do many different things, and not every company will use them the same.
Some will use them solely for compliance, some to look for bugs and some to track metrics or analytics. There is cloud logging, self-hosted logging solutions, automated logging and many others. Your needs can dictate which options are right for you. Once you identify your needs, you need to look at the options available in your area. Try out a few solutions, see if any have a free trial, and take time to find a solution that works for you.
If you are unsure, you could potentially ask other businesses in your niche or similar companies what solution they use. There is nothing wrong with asking for help online from experts in the field.
In conclusion, this article should tell you all you need to know about log management, and help you to choose the right tools.
