SECURITY MONITORING
PRESENTATION BY: AAYUSH BHAILA
Definition:
Cloud security monitoring is the practice of continuously supervising
both virtual and physical servers to analyze data for threats and
vulnerabilities.
Monitoring is a critical component of cloud security and management.
Typically relying on automated solutions, cloud security monitoring
supervises virtual and physical servers to continuously assess and
measure data, application, or infrastructure behaviors for potential
security threats.
How Does Cloud Security Monitoring Work?
More than one measures are there that provides online data monitoring process. It can either be
done on cloud platform itself or on-premises environment through already existing security
software. Following are basic key capabilities that need to be covered in a cloud security
monitoring application:
Scalability – Product should be capable enough to handle and analyze the huge amount of data
under a distributed business environment.
Visibility – The more the visibility process is present in the software, file behavior, and user, the
better it will be able to identify Cyber attacks and compromised accounts.
Timeliness – The best cloud monitoring service should render continuous service to monitor
activities that are carried away with business online resources.
Integration – monitoring tools must integrate with a wide range of cloud storage providers to
ensure full monitoring of an organization’s cloud usage.
Auditing and Reporting – cloud monitoring software should provide auditing and reporting
capabilities to manage compliance requirements for cloud security.
Benefits of Cloud Security Monitoring
Cloud security monitoring provides the following benefits:
Maintain compliance. Monitoring is a requirement for nearly every major regulation.
Cloud-based organizations must use monitoring tools to avoid compliance violations and
costly fees.
Identify vulnerabilities. Automated monitoring solutions can quickly alert IT and
security teams about anomalies and help identify patterns that point to risky or malicious
behavior. Overall, this brings a deeper level of observability and visibility to cloud
environments.
Prevent loss of business. An overlooked security incident can be detrimental and even
result in shutting down business operations, leading to a decrease in customer trust and
satisfaction — especially if customer data was leaked. Cloud security monitoring can help
with business continuity and data security, while avoiding a potentially catastrophic data
breach.
Increase security maturity. An organization with a mature InfoSec model has a
proactive, multi-layered approach to security. A cloud monitoring solution enables
Cloud Security Monitoring Challenges
Lack of cloud security strategy. Many organizations hastily migrate to the cloud to
support remote work without developing a clear cloud security strategy.
Without a clear strategy, an organization will not be able to fully reap the benefits of a
cloud security monitoring solution.
Alert fatigue. Many cloud monitoring products are noisy, which can result in IT and
security teams lacking insight into what’s important to focus on. Cloud monitoring
solutions with prioritized alerts can reduce the noise and chances of receiving false
positives, which provides higher security value.
Lack of context. Logs and alerts are only valuable if an organization understands how
to interpret them. Security teams should understand what they want to monitor and why;
once they receive alerts, they should know which actions to take. A best-in-class threat
detection and response platform will provide remediation steps and playbooks in addition
to prioritized alerts.
Cloud Security Monitoring Best Practices
These cloud security monitoring best practices will help you to be strategic, gain visibility into your
environment and provide layers of security that will protect against threats:
Carefully evaluate cloud service providers. The big three cloud service providers (Google, Amazon
and Microsoft) are fairly comparable when it comes to security. Regardless of the vendor,
organizations should evaluate levels of compliance and data/network availability to ensure that it fits
their needs.
Perform a cloud infrastructure inventory. Security teams should do a deep dive into their existing
cloud infrastructure to understand potential risks, such as shadow IT. Organizations should perform
regular audits and know what changes were made within their cloud environments to help identify
causes of misconfigurations.
Take a layered approach to cloud security. Setting up layers of security can help organizations to
achieve the most visibility into their tech stack. Native cloud monitoring tools such
as AWS GuardDuty can help with that, but it’s important to bring in specialized tools to address
different components of the tech stack, from physical hardware to orchestration.
Instant Alert on Cyber Attack Occurrence
CONCLUSION
Security monitoring in cloud computing technology is important in
today’s era because nothing is safe in this Cyber world. Data protection
and safety against Cyber threats both things are in the hand of cloud
service providers and its consumers. If anyone of the entity does not
deal with online security solutions in a serious manner then, no one can
stop the occurrence of internal or external Cyber attacks.
THANK YOU
