Question

A financial services company must retain 7 years of transaction audit logs to satisfy regulatory requirements. The logs are queried frequently during the first 30 days for operational troubleshooting, occasionally between 30 and 90 days for reconciliation, and rarely afterward but must remain immutable and undeletable for the full retention period. The team wants to minimize storage cost while guaranteeing that no user, including project administrators, can delete or overwrite the logs before 7 years elapse. What should you implement?

Accepted Answer

Store logs in a Cloud Storage bucket with a bucket retention policy locked to 7 years, and configure lifecycle rules to transition objects from Standard to Nearline at 30 days and to Coldline at 90 days.

Answer

Store logs in a single Standard-class bucket, apply IAM conditions denying delete permissions to all users, and rely on Cloud Audit Logs to detect any deletion attempts.

Answer

Store logs in a bucket with Object Versioning enabled and a lifecycle rule that deletes noncurrent versions after 7 years, transitioning current objects to Archive storage at 30 days.

Answer

Store logs in BigQuery with a table expiration set to 7 years and partition expiration disabled, granting only read access to analysts.