Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Much of what the Microsoft 365 audit log records as user activity is the platform itself. Twelve patterns that look like exfiltration, password spray or privilege escalation, and what each one really is.

Drift Happens. Six months ago, your SAP landscape passed audit cleanly. Today? You couldn’t say for certain without a manual scramble across Basis, security, and infrastructure teams to reconstruct what’s true right now. You did exactly that for the audit, after all. That gap between “was compliant” and “is compliant” is where most SAP security programs quietly fail.

How to find, search and retain the SharePoint audit log in Microsoft 365 - the Purview audit search, Search-UnifiedAuditLog PowerShell, retention limits, and where the native audit trail falls short.

Most IT teams know how to perform a hardware audit in theory. In practice, the process breaks down at the same point every time: the data. Devices in the registry no longer exist. Devices that exist have no owner on record. Lifecycle information is scattered across spreadsheets and vendor portals. A hardware audit that starts from fragmented records doesn't produce a reliable result. It produces a best guess.

If you've shipped software in fintech, healthcare, or government, you probably know the specific dread of an upcoming compliance audit. Not because the software isn't secure, but because proving it is requires reconstructing a paper trail for decisions that were made in Jira tickets, Slack threads, and pull request comments over the last six months. The software is fine. The documentation of the software is the problem.

Depending on the success of your database audit trail program, creating an audit trail for your data log can either be a benign part of company protocol or a major nuisance. Several industries, from health care to finance to public works, require detailed reporting of data logs through an audit trail.

Knowing how to audit different types of IT hardware matters because a laptop, a server, and a network switch fail an audit for completely different reasons. Treating every device the same way during an audit means missing the checks that actually matter for each category, from disk encryption on an endpoint to firmware version on a router.