Cloud security monitoring consists of various processes that aid organisations in reviewing, managing and observing operational workflows in a cloud environment. It combines manual and automated processes to track and assess the effectiveness of security in applications, services, and platforms including websites.
Cloud security experts can monitor and assess the data on an ongoing basis. If they identify a vulnerability or threat, they can recommend remediations to address the issue and mitigate any further damage.
What are the benefits of cloud security monitoring?
While cloud security monitoring comes with quite a few advantages, here are the major ones:
1. Maintaining compliance:
Regulations such as PCI DSS and HIPAA require continuous monitoring. Organisations with cloud platforms can leverage observation tools and comply with these regulations, thereby avoiding penalties.
2. Avoiding business disruptions:
Security incidents and cyberattacks can disrupt business operations and in some cases, force you to shut down. Such data breaches can impact customer satisfaction and trust. Hence, businesses must invest in cloud environments to maintain business continuity and data security.
3. Discovering vulnerabilities:
Actively scanning for vulnerabilities helps bring visibility to the threat landscape. Automated tools can quickly identify and send alerts to your security teams. They can also help identify compromised hosts using available indicators of compromise (IoCs.)
4. Protecting sensitive information:
With cloud security monitoring solutions, you can perform regular audits and keep your data secure. You can also receive recommendations for improving your security measures.
5. Continuous monitoring and support:
Cloud monitoring systems can help you monitor your cloud workloads 24x7. These systems give you the ability to detect, validate and respond to threats actively and in real-time.
How does cloud security monitoring work?
Cloud monitoring tools aggregate log data from multiple servers, application endpoints and the cloud service provider itself. It then correlates and analyzes collected data to identify anomalous activity or known threat signatures.
The following are some of the capabilities required for Cloud Security Monitoring:
1. Powerful search:
The ability of the system to pull out relevant data in seconds is extremely important for a monitoring system, a powerful search engine enables a user to interactively look for symptoms.
2. Continuous monitoring:
The solutions should continuously monitor and allow you to detect suspicious activity in real-time and if possible automatically mitigate the threat.
3. Auditing:
Powerful auditing capability of monitoring tools can help you maintain compliance and regulations that apply to your organisation.
4. Visibility:
Cloud monitoring tools can centralise monitoring and provide a unified view of application and user behaviour profiles while being able to visually identify anomalies.
5. Scalability:
Cloud tools can monitor large volumes of data across multiple locations and be able to perform historical analytics to build retrospective profiles or search for IOCs.
6. Integration:
Monitoring solutions should be able to integrate with ease with your existing tools to provide maximum visibility. Choosing a solution that can work with your existing productivity suites and identity verification using a common SSO would be ideal.
Using SIEM for cloud security monitoring
Using a SIEM, you can simplify real-time cloud security monitoring. It can allow you to gain comprehensive visibility into your cloud-based services. A modern SIEM should enable you to continuously collect, normalise and analyse the rich event and forensic data from your cloud infrastructure.
One of the most important features of SIEM tools is the correlation of events that may indicate attacks and incidents. With a cloud-centric attack workflow, you can ensure a strong set of playbooks and workflows -- which can enable your team to track and detect malicious cloud behaviours.
Cloud-based SIEM services can help SOC teams effectively to search for compromised assets, identify incidents and provide remediation, based on gathered intelligence.
Cloud security monitoring with DNIF HYPERCLOUD
DNIF HYPERCLOUD is a cloud-native platform that brings the functionality of SIEM, UEBA and SOAR into a single continuous workflow to solve cybersecurity challenges at scale. It can integrate natively with cloud infrastructure providers, delivering ready-made out of the box use cases to detect threats on the cloud. Book a demo and see how you can get started in minutes with standardised infrastructure, metrics and threat detection capability.
