Web servers are front-end facing applications that are vital for the daily operations of businesses. They are subject to attacks such as SQL injection, malicious URL requests, and the age-old classic, denial of service (DoS) attacks. While there are specialized web application security solutions that you can (and should) deploy, auditing web server logs is just as important for ensuring your web servers are secure and always up and running.

With large enterprises increasing their focus on public cloud providers, Microsoft Azure continues to have a strong foothold in the hybrid cloud industry. Azure adoption increased a whopping 11 percent last year from 34 to 45 percent, reveals the latest survey by RightScale.

Insider threats are on the rise. In fact, both administrators and average employees are among the biggest security threats in an organization. When it comes to security auditing, there are two areas you need to focus on: Active Directory changes and individual user activity, particularly administrator activity.

In part 1, we looked at an overview of auditing servers. In this blog, we’ll discuss which events you need to audit in your databases and file servers where sensitive data is stored. New data protection regulations and large-scale global attacks have made this more important than ever before. The main goal is to not only ensure that the accesses and modifications to sensitive data in your network are authorized, but also that file and column integrity are maintained.

It’s 2am. You receive a notification from your monitoring tool. A host server ran out of space and your system is down. Now you need to get out of bed and clear the log files of whatever service has filled up your available disk space. Ugh. Now, imagine that an automated action is triggered, the log files are cleared, and your system is up and running again without requiring a single thing from you. Sounds cool, right?

Everyone knows about the importance of log management in IT security. Yet, organizations struggle with implementing effective log management techniques in their networks. This blog series aims to revisit the fundamentals of log management and discuss the different security events you need to keep track of in each of the different systems in your environment.