Best practices frameworks are emerging to help IT organizations meet compliance objectives. Industry experts agree on the importance of log management as a cornerstone of any organization's risk management strategy. Log data can provide a complete real-time and historical record of access, activity, and configuration changes for applications, servers, and network devices. It can also be used to aid with security and business policy validation. Lastly, IT managers can use log data to receive early warning of potential security and performance problems and can mine log data for root cause analysis to aid in system recovery and damage cleanup after a security or performance incident. Considering all of its uses, log data management not only assists in achieving corporate compliance, it also reduces the risks of legal exposure from security breaches and of costly network downtime.