The ownCloud Audit App was designed to meet the need of the hour. The past few decades have witnessed an expeditious advancement of technology. Alongside, virtually all organizations, especially those operating on a global level and managing a network of users, employers, vendors, suppliers and other third-party relationships, find themselves faced with new and more sophisticated challenges with respect to data protection and compliance.
This is where the ownCloud Audit App comes in. It aims to provide a secure data protection and compliance system by enabling enterprises to enjoy full control and access to actions performed on its platform.
What is the ownCloud Audit App?
To put it simply, the ownCloud Audit App records the actions that users and administrators of an enterprise conduct on a platform and the ways in which they handle sensitive data. These actions are logged and traceable in the Audit App, and can be accessed and proven by an enterprise as and when the need arises, for example, when data breach or data abuse is suspected.
Why use the ownCloud Audit App?
An absent or inadequate data protection and compliance system can prove to be severely detrimental to a company, in terms of loss of data, time, money and even goodwill. That is why it is vital to invest in an all-round data protection plan. By using the ownCloud Audit App, enterprises can:
- Maintain full control over actions performed by users and administrators on the platform
- Reduce the risk of data abuse, data breach and cyber crimes
- Enable immediate flagging and follow-up of suspicious digital activities
- Ensure data protection in scenarios where access to data is strictly regulated, for example, in the healthcare or financial sector
- Carry out reporting and auditing of operations
- Prove compliance with corporate guidelines
The many advantages of using the Audit App
How does the Audit App work?
The ownCloud Audit App logs the actions performed by users and administrators. These log entries are written in JSON format and are optimized to be consumed by professional log analyzers (like Splunk or ELK stack) to collect statistics, derive visualizations and set alerts for certain events of interest.
The logs are written to the owncloud.log file by default. If you require a separate log file, for example, for legal or compliance reasons, you will find an example of how to split those in config.sample.php.
Splunk Integration and the Audit Log Dashboard
The ownCloud integration for Splunk consists of an app and an add-on, both available in Splunkbase. Splunk is configured to retrieve log, audit and metrics data from the ownCloud Metrics API and the ownCloud Enterprise Audit App.
Splunk uses this data to provide reports, visualizations, filterable views and alerts for specific events.
The ownCloud integration for Splunk provides a highly visual audit log dashboard that puts CI(S)Os firmly in control of data flows, so that they can quickly and efficiently spot potential compliance issues if and when they arise and take necessary action.
Dashboards provide a ready and detailed analysis for auditing files, logins and actions performed by users and admins. The ownCloud integration for Splunk facilitates the tracing and investigating of actions in a lucid and clear graphical user interface with the help of flexible filters.
Splunk overview
ownCloud Audit App compatibility:
The ownCloud Audit App is available as a part of the Enterprise edition.
