You must retain new user logs in Google Cloud for internal audit (1 year) and compliance (3 years), keep them searchable, and minimize effort. Where should you store them?

Ingesting logs into Cloud Logging as custom logs and setting a custom retention period is the most efficient solution. Cloud Logging is designed for log ingestion, storage, and searchability, directly addressing the requirement for searchable logs. Custom retention policies allow you to easily meet both the 1-year internal audit and 3-year compliance requirements within a single, managed service, minimizing operational effort. Storing logs in Cloud Storage buckets, even with lifecycle policies or bucket locks, primarily provides object storage, not optimized log searchability without additional tooling. While it can meet retention, it adds complexity for searching. Manually moving logs between buckets after a year introduces unnecessary operational overhead.