Cost-Effective Log File Retention for Financial Companies | Google Cloud Solution

Implementing a Cost-Effective Approach for Log File Retention

Question

Your organization is a financial company that needs to store audit log files for 3 years.

Your organization has hundreds of Google Cloud projects.

You need to implement a cost-effective approach for log file retention.

What should you do?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

A.

https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/audit/

For a financial company that needs to store audit log files for 3 years, the best cost-effective approach for log file retention on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) would be to create an export to the sink that saves logs from Cloud Audit to a Coldline Storage bucket.

Option A: Creating an export to the sink that saves logs from Cloud Audit to BigQuery may not be the best solution for a cost-effective approach as it may become expensive over time, especially when dealing with large amounts of data.

Option B: Creating an export to the sink that saves logs from Cloud Audit to a Coldline Storage bucket is a cost-effective solution for storing audit log files. Coldline Storage is a low-cost storage option on GCP designed for long-term retention and archival of data. Coldline Storage is cheaper than other GCP storage options like Standard or Nearline Storage, but retrieval times can be longer than other storage classes.

Option C: Writing a custom script that uses logging API to copy the logs from Stackdriver logs to BigQuery can be an option, but it may require additional resources and maintenance to manage and monitor the script.

Option D: Exporting these logs to Cloud Pub/Sub and writing a Cloud Dataflow pipeline to store logs to Cloud SQL may not be the most cost-effective solution as it involves additional services like Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Dataflow, which can add to the overall cost of storing audit logs.

In conclusion, option B is the best solution for a cost-effective approach for log file retention for a financial company that needs to store audit log files for 3 years on GCP.