From manufacturers in Michigan to fintechs in Finland, every business must comply with industry regulations — which are increasingly constraining. At the same time, businesses must protect and account for a growing number of systems, applications and data in order to remain compliant.
In other words, compliance is getting harder.
Enter log management. While regulations vary by country and industry, nearly every organization must store compliance-relevant information for a certain period of time. The trouble comes when you’ve got an assortment of tools emitting logs in an inconsistent fashion.
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A good log management system solves this problem by ingesting data from disparate sources and storing it in a central location where it can easily be searched. This post explores how CrowdStrike Falcon® LogScale delivers the right mix of speed, scale and cost for compliance use cases, regardless of your business type.
Now Required: Log Management for Compliance
Compliance is all about controlling your systems. The way to ensure that control is through preventive or detective controls. Log management is a key component for detective controls and the workflow around them. Meaning: Whatever the regulations say you should or shouldn’t do, those events can easily be captured by a logging system.
Log management is so integral for compliance, in fact, that most regulations and frameworks require centralized log management.
Take cybersecurity. Security teams can — and should — log relevant host activity for threat detection, hunting and investigations. But an adversary can delete or manipulate log files, especially if they are stored on the host. From a defense standpoint, you want to get those logs off the host system as quickly as possible. A modern log management system can instantly log those events for safekeeping and give incident responders a trail of evidence to see how deep the breach went.
These digital forensics not only help with business continuity but they make for a much easier discussion when the data breach authorities come knocking. Fines increase dramatically when you have inadequate controls in place, which explains how companies have racked up $4.4 trillion USD in data breach fines, penalties and settlements.
Log management is useful for both security and non-security compliance requirements. Whether it’s health and safety, Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards, or a different regulatory framework, the fundamental ability to store and search your log data can make audits a breeze, while adding value in other areas of the business.
How to Use Falcon LogScale for Compliance
Falcon LogScale is CrowdStrike’s log management and observability solution. It bolsters organizations’ security posture by allowing teams to hunt for threats, investigate possible attacks, identify risks and gain valuable insights from all log and event data in real time.
From a compliance standpoint, Falcon LogScale offers organizations a scalable, high-performance log management solution with a robust query language for threat hunting and analysis. Customizable dashboards and optional data masking make Falcon LogScale ideally suited for compliance teams. With flexible, cloud-native and self-hosted deployment options — as well as high compression rates and a small infrastructure footprint — Falcon LogScale is the easy, cost-effective choice for compliance and long-term log storage.
Here are four popular features of Falcon LogScale to help with your compliance goals:
- Scale. Falcon LogScale is highly scalable. Last year, Falcon LogScale achieved a scalability benchmark of 1 petabyte of data ingestion per day, making it the most scalable log management solution on the planet. As your compliance data requirements grow, Falcon LogScale grows with you.
- Speed. Falcon LogScale allows you to ingest and search logs with minimal latency. For example, Great American Insurance Group can query 3 billion records in under a second. This speed comes in handy when auditors ask questions you don’t anticipate. With LogScale, you can quickly find answers to any question — think seconds not days.
- Flexibility. Legacy log management solutions come bloated with out-of-the-box reporting capabilities. Falcon LogScale comes streamlined with a fast and flexible search engine that allows you to compile the exact data needed for audits. Check out our Infrastructure Savings Estimator to compare the infrastructure footprint of Falcon LogScale with legacy systems.
- Cost. Falcon LogScale compresses data by 10x on average, drastically reducing storage costs (and hence, compliance costs). One bank in Norway says this translated to millions in savings over three years. In a 2022 Forrester Total Economic Impact
study, Falcon LogScale showed a 210% ROI after three years, offering an extremely low total cost of ownership.
Compliance as a Secondary Benefit
Most companies don’t use Falcon LogScale strictly for compliance. They get it for security, DevOps or operations (or all three) and then use it for compliance as well. Because Falcon LogScale allows you to ingest virtually any data source and then store that data for as long as you need it, compliance becomes a secondary benefit.
This was the case for a hospital system in Denmark. They primarily used Falcon LogScale to collect and query security-related logs for enhanced threat hunting. But when auditors threatened to shut down their kitchen due to inadequate temperature monitoring capabilities, the hospital turned to Falcon LogScale.
They realized their digital kitchen equipment was capable of emitting log files. Now, the hospital uses Falcon LogScale to ingest and dashboard temperature data from their kitchen devices, allowing them to improve food quality while complying with food safety regulations.
Compliance requirements aren’t getting any easier. Falcon LogScale is a modern log management and observability solution that allows any organization to ingest and search their log and event data at unrivaled speed, scale and cost — making it ideal for compliance.
Additional Resources
- Try Falcon LogScale for free with the Falcon LogScale Community Edition.
- Contact us to schedule a personalized demo of Falcon LogScale.
- Read the 2022 Forrester Study: The Total Economic Impact of CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale to learn the benefits and cost savings of Falcon LogScale.
- Visit the Falcon LogScale product page to learn more.
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