Azure long-term audit log

Question

We have a medical application that requires to store audit logs for 6 years (HIPAA requirement).

Looking at the new Azure Monitor service, it seems it will retain information for a maximum of 730 days (see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/monitor/):

How is data retention calculated? You can select a retention period ranging from 30 to 730 days. The retention cost calculation is done on a daily granularity based on the monthly price per GB being stored beyond the 31 days of included retention.

Unfortunately this is a deal breaker, so we need to find another performance- and cost-effective Azure service for storing our audit logs. The audit log records need to have an API, be searchable by multiple criteria and support high-traffic.

What are the alternatives?

Answer 1

I dont think native audit logging\azure monitor offers something like that, so you are only left with various workarounds.

you could forward these logs to event hub\azure storage and process them into, say, cosmos db relatively easy with azure function. I think you can also setup forwarding to a SIEM solution. Generally there are a bunch of ways of solving this with using various other cloud resources.

Or you can consult this official article on how to archive those.