Strengthening compliance and risk management with Elastic Observability: A case for India's banking sector

RBI’s directives underscore the importance of meticulous audit and logging practices to protect critical and sensitive information. Key aspects include:

• Information Technology Governance, Risk, Controls, and Assurance Practices (November 7, 2023): RBI requires IT applications that access critical information to have comprehensive audit and system logging capabilities. These logs must be detailed enough to facilitate audits, serve as forensic evidence, and assist in dispute resolution. Regular monitoring of these logs is essential to detect unauthorized activities and ensure compliance. (RBI Notification)

• Digital Payment Security Controls (February 18, 2021): The directive mandates that mobile and internet banking applications have effective logging and monitoring capabilities. This includes tracking user activities and security changes and identifying anomalous behavior to prevent fraud and enhance security. (Digital Payment Security Controls)

CERT-In's directives focus on the secure maintenance and availability of logs for ICT systems, emphasizing:

• Directions under Section 70B, Information Technology Act, 2000 (April 28, 2022): CERT-In mandates that all service providers, intermediaries, data centers, body corporates, and government organizations enable logging for all ICT systems and maintain these logs securely for a rolling period of 180 days within Indian jurisdiction. These logs must be available for submission to CERT-In upon request or during incident investigations, ensuring transparency and compliance with national cybersecurity standards. (CERT-In Directions)

Elastic Observability's log analytics capabilities have been instrumental in helping some of India's largest banks not only achieve compliance requirements but also tackle advanced monitoring and risk management use cases. 

Elastic's log analytics solution, part of Elastic Observability, allows you to ingest once and leverage the data everywhere. It provides a comprehensive toolkit for log analytics, including:

• Elasticsearch for storing, searching, and analyzing large volumes of log data

• Various integrations like Elastic Agent, Logstash, and Beats for ingesting, processing, and transforming log data from multiple sources

• Kibana for creating interactive dashboards, charts, and visualizations to explore and understand the log data

By leveraging the Elastic Stack, organizations can gain valuable insights from their log data, quickly resolve application and system issues, and proactively plan for future challenges. Elastic's log analytics solution is designed to scale, integrate, and provide cost-effective log management for enterprises of all sizes.