Logs are crucial component of virtually any network. From recording data retrievals and monitoring traffic to keeping track of updates and flagging errors, every action that takes place in your AWS environment creates a log.
For healthcare organizations working in the cloud, these records are crucial for support and security issues. Not only will your customers need to know how to identify and troubleshoot problems, HIPAA and HITRUST regulations require audit logs be kept in order to ensure compliance.
Keeping track of the millions upon millions of logs your network creates, however, can end up costing you extensive time and resources. Especially for healthcare organizations without a dedicated software team, correlating different logs – which may be in a vast range of formats or require extensive knowledge of codes – is both a technical challenge and a logistical headache.
When Logs Go Wrong
Since the early days of cloud-based healthcare organizations, using logs to troubleshoot errors and optimize platform performance has been a complicated, multi-step process that eats up resources. Having to pull and correlate data manually can defeat the purpose of using the cloud and the agile, portable, and scalable operations it does best.
Consider a typical use case: Your customer service team receives a surge of phone calls at 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. Something must have gone wrong with your server. But looking through error logs to find the corresponding notifications won’t be enough to figure out and solve the problem and reassure customers that it won’t happen again.
Finding a root cause involves a lot more than simply getting things back up and running. To troubleshoot the issue, you’ll need to correlate error logs with logs for traffic moving through your system at the time (types, volume), as well as the logs for the system metrics that your network recorded (CPU use, memory).
Without the ability to view all of this data in a common language and on a single pane of glass, both you and your customers will be left scrambling. Even worse, all the time and resources you’ll need to devote to the problem might very well hold up progress in more important aspects of your mission.
Unified Logging
Here’s where unified logging comes in. The latest addition to Cloudticity Oxygen’s array of fully automated and customizable services, unified logging boils these disparate records down to a common format and a single report. By correlating this data easily and efficiently, managing logs and drawing actionable conclusions from them becomes much simpler.
Unified Logging And Your Customers
Unified logging immediately solves for use cases like the troubleshooting described above. Even if you have a dedicated software team, that team might not know where to look within the countless logs that your business produces. Unified logging enables you to diagnose the problem more accurately and solve it more quickly, and get both your network and your customers back on track.
The service also means that non-technical people – including, potentially, your clients – gain a new level of visibility into their systems. Unified logging system not only pulls together all this information from the network, it also combines it in a single dashboard that your customer service team can show to clients to provide clear explanations.
Unified Logging And Compliance
The advantages of unified logging don’t just come in at the level of customer support, however. The service also plays a crucial role in compliance. Regulatory bodies such as HIPAA and HITRUST require not only that businesses keep audit logs, but also that those logs be both searchable and analyzable.
HIPAA and HITRUST are also increasingly concerned that healthcare organizations implement machine learning and artificial intelligence in their processes. Unified logging immediately satisfies a huge number of these controls, and is therefore crucial for performing analytics.
Unified Logging And Accessibility
While other cloud partners have developed tools that come close to doing what unified logging does, those tools are typically both expensive and proprietary, costing a quarter of a million of dollars and coded in a language readable only by specialists. In order to effectively run queries within such systems, you’ll need both funding and the time to learn an entirely new language.
On the other hand, Cloudticity Oxygen’s unified logging service is easily readable, because it is written in the standard database language SQL (Structured Query Language). Built entirely with native AWS tools, it easily replaces third-party tools, which your business might only be using a small portion of. By contrast, Cloudticity will only install components necessary to your specific use cases.
From Headache To Head Start
Every network creates and stores logs, but making sense of them for security and compliance purposes requires better solutions. Keeping logs that aren’t both accurate and actionable means wasted information and wasted opportunities. Unified logging can transform your business’ support and compliance practices from technical and laborious to automated and accessible.
The Cloud Can Accelerate HITRUST Certification
These Five Things Will Help You Choose The Right Partner
