Free EditionGoogle Cloud Platform (GCP) logs contain the sensitive data of organizations. Within this data category is customer data that organizations protect by adherence to certain laws, regulations, and guidelines. Poor data breach compliance processes can hurt customers and impact an organization's reputation. Apart from loss of privacy, a data breach can lead to potential identity theft as customer information can be sold elsewhere. Additionally, failure to meet compliance requirements can result in federal fines, and in some cases, legal action.
Logs contain data that provide insights into changes occurring in your cloud environment that could result in security threats. A SIEM solution like Log360 provides comprehensive centralized log management to collect, monitor, and analyze log data from your cloud resources, and to proactively help thwart security threats. Using Log360, organizations can display log data from an intuitive, interactive dashboard that provides real-time insights into your network environment.
As part of data-protection compliance mandates, IT teams are required to keep a record of log data for audits. This includes retaining log data for a specified period of time. The following are some important compliance mandates and their required log retention periods.
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS): Created to protect credit cardholder data, this standard requires organizations to maintain log data for one year, with a minimum of the last three month's worth of logs being available for immediate analysis.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): This standard, created to protect patient data in the healthcare industry, requires organizations to retain log data for up to six years.
North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC): Applying to electric power providers, the standard overseen by this agency requires organizations to retain log data for six months.
Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX): This standard, created to specify auditing and financial regulations for organizations, requires that log data be retained for up to seven years.
On a daily basis, tasks such as monitoring, troubleshooting, security, and more generate log data that require the IT department's attention. Log360 simplifies the log management process, by making it easy to archive, store, and retain log data, including GCP logs, for an indefinite period by default. You can also modify the log retention period by changing the number of days cited in Admin settings. Log retention not only simplifies your log management process and helps meet compliance standards, but also helps investigate historical logs for security violations or breaches.
Learn how Log360 helps with Google Cloud Platform log retention and compliance.
