Auditing and reporting play important roles in the security and compliance strategy for many organizations. With the continued expansion of the technology landscape that has an ever-increasing number of systems, endpoints, operations, and regulations, it becomes even more important to have a comprehensive logging and reporting solution in place.
Auditing and reporting benefits
There are two main benefit categories for continued auditing and reporting, those are:
Security benefits
Audit logs can be used to detect security violations and/or breaches, after or – sometimes – before they occur. They can also be used to identify internal organization policy violations or misuse of systems or information. More importantly, logs can be used to assist with recovery processes (either from an attack or a system outage) or troubleshooting technical problems. Finally, audit logs are valuable assets and strong evidence in legal battles, which can save organizations endless headaches.
Compliance benefits
Many organizations need to comply with various regulations to be able to operate in a certain business (Finance, healthcare, government, etc.). one of the main requirements of these regulatory bodies is keeping (and reviewing!) logs and reports. Audit logs can be considered during an audit to prove that the organization complies with regulations.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published an interesting article that discusses in great detail the how and the why you should use audit logs.