Enterprise data growth is accelerating rapidly in 2021, challenging organizations to adopt cloud data retention strategies that maximize the value of data and fulfill compliance needs while minimizing costs. To meet this challenge, organizations are adopting or refining their cloud data retention strategies. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the state of data retention and analytics in the cloud.

Logs are automatically-generated records of events that take place within a cloud-based application, network, or infrastructure service. These records are stored in log files, creating an audit trail of system events that can be analyzed for a variety of purposes, including: Enterprise organizations use log analytics software to aggregate, transform, and analyze data from log files, developing insights that drive business decisions and operational excellence.

To understand the value of logs—those many digital records of hardware and software events—picture a big puzzle. You put all the pieces together to make sense of them. Every day the modern enterprise generates billions of logs, each capturing a user log-in, application record change, network service interruption—as well as the messages these entities send to one another.

Innovation in hypervisor technology in the early 2000’s from both commercial and open source projects was the genesis for the public cloud as we know it today. Virtualization and Moore’s law, together with advances in storage technology, mobile and wireless, created a data explosion that continues to accelerate through today.