Security and system logs are things you pull up when you have no other choice -- when a problem occurs and that's the only way to find it, right?

Wrong, according to a survey conducted recently by SenSage Inc. , a security information and log management vendor. In an informal poll of its customers, SenSage has discovered that 75 percent of enterprises are now looking at logs every day.

"We were surprised by the responses," Ed Chopskie, vice president of marketing at SenSage, tells Dark Reading. "It wasn't so long ago that looking at logs was sort of a last resort."

The need for regulatory compliance is what's causing the shift, Chopskie says. Now that auditors are looking for data to prove security and access control, logs are becoming a more everyday source of information.

And enterprises are storing and using those logs much longer than they did previously, Chopskie says. In the survey, 74 percent of respondents said they store log data for more than 12 months -- likely a hedge against future audits, he feels.

Enterprises also are checking a wider variety of logs -- including systems like routers, databases, and mainframes -- and distributing the data to Windows administrators and others who aren't normally associated with security, the company said.

— Tim Wilson, Site Editor, Dark Reading