Determine what makes sense for you and what provides you with the best information. Susan Bradleyīottom line: Evaluate applications, logging and anything else that might be time sensitive and determine if they can be moved to UTC time or have an easy conversion from the local time to UTC time. It can be combined with a list of servers to determine the time zone of numerous systems. The command Get-TimeZone will respond with the time zone of the computer. Before migrating applications to the cloud, evaluate if they can handle a transition to UTC time.įinally, you can use PowerShell to determine the exact time zone of the computer and use it to determine the time zone from a series of remote computers. Older SQL applications often were written without cloud platforms in mind and using local time. You had to make an adjustment if you wanted a local time zone.Īs you can see, the registry key identifies what time zone the computer is in.Īs noted in a recent article, when dealing with time and Azure and especially SQL, consider GETUTCDATE and SYSUTCDATETIME instead of using functions like GETDATE and SYSDATETIME. This document defined the date and time files to always be in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which shares the same current time as UTC. As noted in KB271196, the extended log file format used by IIS was defined in the W3C Working Draft WD- logfile-960323 specification by Phillip M. For example, for many years Microsoft’s web server, Internet Information Services (IIS) would by default choose UTC time based on a specification. Thus, it’s wise to investigate ahead of time what time zone is chosen. Often applications choose a time zone for you. You should also check with your logging and firewall vendors to see what they recommend for selection of time. If all of the logs are pulled into a central location from various time zones for analysis, you might choose UTC to do a cross analysis. If you are a small firm and all your administrators and users are in one time zone, logging into that time zone might be more appropriate. Moving logging to UTC helps keep your entire network in sync.Īs with any decision, you need to evaluate what makes sense for your organization. It is based on Universal Time (UT1), which uses the speed of the Earth’s rotation to measure time.Īs I explained earlier, if you cannot properly sync time across your network, it can have negative effect on security updates, authentication and forensics investigations. UTC is a 24-hour time standard that helps the world’s timing centers keep their time scales synchronized. What is UTC and why is it important to security? Add to that having help desks and distributed organizations and making the correlation across organizations means that moving logging to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) may be wise. Suddenly, setting logging to local time made no sense at all. Then the internet was born, and we moved our servers to the cloud and data centers. This made correlation of events, especially to local computers, consistent and relatively easy. Once upon a time we set the logging for servers in the local time of wherever they were located. As we added technology, we just built on the concept of the need for local time. As travel increased in scope and type, the need for standardization demanded that we had time zones. It was also used to reduce accidents and issues in scheduling trains entering and leaving stations. In England, to organize trains and schedules, the concept of railway time was introduced to overcome the confusion caused by having non-uniform local times in each town and station stop. The concept of time zones is a relatively one.
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