In this blog, we will discuss about log analysis and the top reasons why businesses need to analyze their logs – the sooner the better.
At first glance, log data analysis seems like something that should be left to your business's IT department.
However, log analysis plays such a critical role that you should be paying attention to it for insightful and specific business-centric points of view.
Analyzing data affects your entire business, including legal, sales and marketing, finance, human resources, security, and operations.
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Through log analysis, you have the opportunity to discover problems long before they occur or as they happen and avoid unnecessary delays and lost critical time. Analyzing your business logs brings you a whole set of benefits.
For instance, your business becomes better at responding to incidents, reduces expenses, helps increase revenue as well as ensures that you are operating within legal requirements.
Find out the significant reasons businesses need to analyze their logs – the sooner, the better.
1. Improved business operations
One of the most apparent benefits of carrying out log analysis is it’s a tool that can be used to improve your business operations. These functions include detecting critical errors in your system, identifying key trends, and improving operational efficiency.
Log analysis also helps your business in supporting Service Level Agreements (SLA) and, not forgetting, system troubleshooting.
Detecting problems in your system early are one of the best ways of finding and solving money-wasting processes within your organization. In turn, this helps you avoid expensive service disruptions that lead to downtime, unhappy clients, and lost sales.
2. Proper resource allocation
The worst situation any business can find itself in is having the wrong amount of resources available to support critical operations. From storage capacity to network bandwidth to CPU cycles, your business has to get these metrics just right.
Poor allocation of resources easily leads to poor service delivery, frustrated clients, and, eventually, lost sales.
The easiest thing to do is, of course, to over-speculate the resources. On the other hand, this will lead to increased expenses and wastage, which hurts your bottom line.
Using logs and a network monitoring solution, for example, can help you determine the proper resource allocation to ensure you realize maximal productivity for maximum profits.
You can also make use of your logs for verifying third-party billing. For example, make use of available logs to ensure that the amount of bandwidth charged by a service provider is actually right. On its own, this is a benefit that helps improve the bottom line.
3. Improved security
Security is one of the most critical areas to consider while doing business in the modern environment. Logs are essential tools to protect organizations and forensic investigations of security breaches proactively.
If you are under a DNS attack, where someone continuously hammers your site to break your servers, log analysis can reveal lots of helpful information regarding the attackers. The analysis can even assist when blocking them from accessing your site via their IP addresses.
At a proactive level, logs help you optimize the blocking and filtering of incoming traffic, maximize your email virus protection protocol, monitor failed authentication attempts, and verify firewall configurations.
After the fact, you can use logs to assess the compliance of your security policy, initiate reporting of incidences, and investigate security breaches. You cannot understand security risks or respond to security events without log analysis.
4. Achieve compliance
Every business has its own internal policies, including employee, security, and legal. Most businesses must adhere to strict regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. For a clear mind when it comes to HIPAA, your business also should utilize HIPAA-compliant solutions; if you are going to use video conferencing, you should make sure that you are using HIPAA-compliant video conferencing software; the same goes for your email, texting, etc. In most cases, the government imposes such regulations.
The only way to ensure that you follow these policies and meet regulatory requirements is through log analysis. Besides simplifying compliance, log analysis supports litigation needs, audit requirements, forensic investigations, and subpoena requests. Log analysis is the only way to ensure that your business stays out of legal trouble.
5. Support sales and marketing efforts
While it’s not apparent that log analysis can directly impact your business’ sales and marketing, it certainly does. First, log analysis is used to measure the effectiveness of a sales campaign.
Traffic loads, customer navigation, conversion errors, and other similar information are critical in improving the sales process – and you can use logs analysis to drive revenue!
Conclusion:
Overall, whether you are aware or not aware of the fact, analyzing your business log influences every department in your business. Indirectly or directly, log analysis affects every business’ bottom line through increased revenue, reduced expenditure, and delighted clients.
Now you know that log analysis is not a back office task for the IT department alone. Each department requires the intelligence in your business logs to improve performance.
This is why every organization should be proactive in analyzing logs, and now is the best time to start.
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