Center for Internet Security Critical Security Controls

Retention obligations are easy to state and expensive to meet, because the cost is in keeping the record queryable rather than merely stored. Audit events land in columnar storage on immutable object storage, so a multi-year window costs object-storage prices and is still searchable in seconds when an examiner asks for a sample. Each record carries a verification hash, so what you produce years later is demonstrably what was written at the time.

Authorisation is configured in the database; proving it holds is what this requirement actually needs. Vulnerability scanning surfaces excessive privilege and role sprawl, default and weak credentials, and stale or orphaned accounts — including privilege inherited through nested roles, which is where least-privilege reviews usually go wrong. Real-time SQL auditing then shows which of those grants were exercised, so an access review reflects observed use rather than intent.

Rules catch what you already thought of. Behavioural models baseline every user and application against their own history and their peer group, then score deviations in real time — so a service account reading tables it has never touched surfaces without anyone having written a rule for it first. That is what makes monitoring hold up as access patterns change, instead of decaying into a ruleset nobody maintains.

A record of processing is only as good as the layer producing it. Real-time SQL auditing captures every statement against the data — the identity, the session, the client, the objects touched, the outcome — with no nightly batch window where activity goes unrecorded. Classification is what makes that a record of *regulated* data rather than a log of everything: it tells you which tables are in scope, so the register describes the processing you actually have to declare. Policy templates then produce it in the shape the framework asks for, instead of leaving you to assemble it from raw logs the week before an inspection.