The shift to remote work changed the way IT teams collaborate. Instead of walking over to a colleague’s desk, co-workers collaborate digitally. Looking forward, many companies will continue some form of remote work by taking a hybrid approach. Root cause analysis in IT will always require collaboration as teams look to improve service availability and prevent problems. Sitting in front of the same screen and looking at the same data makes it easy to discuss problems.

Every week we get many great questions through support, the community, social media, and our weekly demo. On Fridays, I like to share the most common questions and answers, tips, insights, a closer look at Graylog, interviews, etc. If you have any questions for me, drop them on Twitter, and I’ll do my best to fold them into upcoming Friday posts. Our handle is @graylog2.

Yes, there is the ability to silence or disable alerts in Graylog. There are times in IT environments where you know you are going to generate specific events in your network. As an example, you are patching servers, upgrading hardware components, and many other things. These types of activities are very common during maintenance windows.

With more people working from home, the threat landscape continues to change. Things change daily, and cybersecurity staff needs to change with them to protect information. Threat hunting techniques for an evolving landscape need to tie risk together with log data. Within your environment, there are a few things that you can do to prepare for effective threat hunting. Although none of these is a silver bullet, they can get you better prepared to investigate an alert.

For logs and tracking insider threats, you need to start with the relevant data. In these turbulent times, IT teams leverage centralized log management solutions for making decisions. As the challenges change, the way you’re monitoring logs for insider threats needs to change too. Furloughs, workforce reductions, and business practice changes as part of the COVID stay-at-home mandates impacted IT teams.

The hybrid workforce is here to stay. With that in mind, you should start putting more robust cybersecurity controls in place to mitigate risk. Virtual private networks (VPNs) help secure data, but they are also challenging to bring into your log monitoring and management strategy. VPN and firewall log management gives real-time visibility into security risks. Many VPN and firewall log monitoring problems are similar to log management in general.

Cloud services make the daily tasks of business easier. They enable remote workforce collaboration, streamline administrative tasks, and reduce capital costs. However, these “pros” come with a few “cons.” The IT stack’s increased complexity means staff work across divergent log management tools when something breaks. Centralized log management for the cloud makes root cause analysis easier by aggregating all event log data in a single location.

Even before new hybrid workforce models, many companies already moved a lot of services to the cloud. COVID-19 digital transformation strategies instantly increased the number of access points and endpoints. This led to a rapid increase in event log data followed by all kinds of other issues -- performance, availability, security, and ultimately increased IT costs amongst other things. A centralized log management solution for your cloud environment can help you manage the above and more.

Centralized Log Management offers the visibility you need to optimize your cloud usage to keep infrastructure costs down. Cloud-first infrastructures are the future of modern business operations. As organizations like Google and Twitter announce long-term plans for enabling a remote workforce, maintaining a competitive business model includes scaled cloud services adoption. While the cloud offers scalability that can save money with pay-as-you-need services, managing the costs is challenging.

With 2020 dominated by a global pandemic, organizations expedited their digital transformation strategies. (According to TechFirst podcast, COVID19 accelerated digital transformation by an average of 6 years.) One of the most significant changes was the rapid move to a remote workforce. This required stopgap measures to keep the business running. While these measures met the company’s immediate needs, the measures also introduced anticipated and unanticipated issues.