Continuous monitoring definition & overview

The sooner you spot errors, the earlier you can begin the root cause analysis and the subsequent remediation process. With full visibility, security teams can more easily detect, respond to, and eliminate person and non-person threats like excessive permissions, cloud control misconfigurations and unnecessary permissions to sensitive data. In other words, CSM delivers critical insights, like indicators of exploit, that teams can leverage to remediate timely issues. A rising number of businesses are adopting and utilizing cloud services and capabilities with remarkable success.

It helps teams not only to maximize visibility, but also to respond to issues as proactively as possible. Almost all monitoring operations typically aim to be relatively continuous, in the sense that they collect and interpret data on an ongoing basis. It’s not as if you would monitor your applications by checking in on them only https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ once a day, for example, or monitor your network for security threats only on Tuesday afternoons. For example, suppose you’re running a multi-tier web and mobile application with many moving parts. In that case, you probably already know that the detailed visibility of the health of each component and operation is paramount.

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. Now, we need to consider how we can perform assessment on the code that builds and configures the resources.

You can use the free data usage allotments to get started with no upfront fees or commitments. With all this in mind, let’s take a look at some of the main reasons businesses need CSM. Businesses today are under constant threat of attack or exploit of basic cloud misconfigurations across an ever-expanding threat surface. Start the discussion when we identify that we want to make this kind of change.

What is continuous monitoring?

It was centered around building and knowing an inventory, which could then be enrolled in ongoing scanning, as frequently as every 72 hours. The objective is to determine if assets are authorized to be on the network, are being managed, and if they have software installed that is vulnerable and/or misconfigured. As the cloud becomes a part of the next round of CDM, it is important to understand how the approach to these objectives needs to adapt.

Examples such as this, as well as serverless architectures, challenge traditional continuous monitoring approaches. Sonrai leverages continuous monitoring across its platform, touching upon the many solutions included in Dig. Whether you need identity entitlement management, data protection, cloud security posture management or workload security, Dig provides continuous protection around the clock. IT organizations may also use continuous monitoring as a means of tracking user behavior, especially in the minutes and hours following a new application update. Continuous monitoring solutions can help IT operations teams determine whether the update had a positive or negative effect on user behavior and the overall customer experience. For the proper maintenance and operation of such apps, continuous monitoring at the cloud level is absolutely essential.

What is cloud network monitoring?

Ongoing due diligence and review of security controls enables the security authorization package to remain current which allows agencies to make informed risk management decisions as they use cloud services. Network monitoring is the continuous analysis of a network in order to detect and correct any performance issues within the network infrastructure. It’s becoming increasingly important because most organizations are running infrastructure both on-premises and in the cloud. The practice involves the analysis of the quality of the infrastructural services at both the software and the hardware level.

And, though it’s a shared resource, cloud security has been a major priority, putting early fears of “the cloud isn’t safe” to rest. † Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus uses Cloud Monitoring storage for externally created metric data and uses the Monitoring API to retrieve that data. Managed Service for Prometheus meters based on samples ingested instead of bytes to align with Prometheus’ conventions. For more information about sample-based metering, see Pricing for controllability and predictability. For computational examples, see Pricing examples based on samples ingested.

A continuous monitoring software tool can help IT operations analysts detect application performance issues, identify their cause and implement a solution before the issue leads to unplanned application downtime and lost revenue. It’s a challenge for organizations to manage and meet compliance requirements, so cloud security monitoring tools should provide robust auditing and monitoring capabilities. Cloud services enable resources to be allocated, consumed, and de-allocated on the fly to meet peak demands. Just about any system is going to have times where more resources are required than others, and the cloud allows compute, storage, and network resources to scale with this demand. As an example, within Coalfire we have a Security Parsing Tool (Sec-P) that spins up compute resources to process vulnerability assessment files that are dropped into a cloud storage bucket. The compute resources only exist for a few seconds while the file gets processed, and then they are torn down.

• Consulting closely with all relevant teams’ stakeholders will help you understand their needs and expectations.
• Security-related information collected through continuous monitoring is used to make recurring updates to the security assessment package.
• Automatically infer or custom define service-level objectives (SLOs) for applications and get alerted when SLO violations occur.
• Check out our step-by-step guide to learn how to set SLOs, following SRE best practices.
• When this happens, unauthorized users can gain access to private resources or act upon the privileges they have in the environment.
• CCM continuously monitors control effectiveness and automatically gathers the evidence needed to show compliance.

Blumira’s detection and response platform enables faster resolution of threats to help you stop ransomware attacks and prevent data breaches. Blumira’s team strives to continuously help your organization improve your overall security coverage, providing ongoing expertise as your trusted security advisor. Use of AWS-provided solutions for on-premises infrastructure can further simplify this performance and log data gathering by providing built in mechanisms and deeper integration with cloud services. AWS Outposts, for example, provides built in integration with CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs for monitoring and analysis. In the cloud, a frequent target are workloads, like running an EC2 instance or an Azure VM. Once again, continuous security monitoring helps here, too, and is actually critical.

Like any innovative concept in the world of IT, continuous monitoring is not something you can just buy or turn on. Nor can you implement it using a specific tool or by setting up a certain process. Leveraging logs also allows you to correlate authentication and network events (and compare those to benchmarks) and spot suspicious activities like brute force attacks, password spraying, SQL injection, or data exfiltration. For example, the network logs may highlight unusually large files moving out of your network, while authentication logs could match that activity to a specific user on a particular machine. In this article, we will cover the various types of continuous monitoring, the benefits it delivers, and some best practices for successfully building a continuous monitoring regimen.

What I have reviewed are high-level concepts, but each customer will need to dial in the specifics based on their use cases and objectives. For resources such as our Coalfire Sec-P tool from the previous example, where it exists as code more than 90 percent of the time, we need to think differently. An agent approach may not work as the compute resources may not exist long enough to even check in with the master, let alone perform any security checks. Metrics, events, and metadata are displayed with rich query language that helps identify issues and uncover patterns.

Although it’s tempting to include all systems in your continuous monitoring regimen, doing so can be unnecessarily cost-prohibitive and complex. Consuming valuable network bandwidth, storage capacity, and processing power if you don’t pick your targets carefully. Automate where you can to make sure action is taken swiftly if issues are detected. This includes things like intelligent workflows, which communicate security alerts directly to the team responsible. Additionally, automating remediation to intervene when manual efforts aren’t possible or timely enough. This can expedite resolution and allow security teams to focus on other priorities.

Assets may simply come and go before they can be assessed by a traditional scan tool. There are also quality third-party applications that can be used, some of them even already FedRAMP authorized. Regardless of the service/tool used, the key here is interfacing them with the integration layer of an existing CDM or continuous monitoring solution. This can occur via API calls to and from the solution, which are made possible by the current CDM program requirements. Cloud infrastructure provides national security, defense, and national law enforcement organizations with efficiency and elasticity, helping them move faster than they could with traditional network and system monitoring tools. Moving faster with the cloud means that these organizations must also regularly validate the effectiveness of cloud controls to mitigate risk.

But embracing cloud tools and services often brings unexpected changes for business leaders and IT teams, especially because of the way in which cloud adoption has altered how networks are monitored and managed. Compared to traditional manual, sample-based control monitoring, CCM offers wider coverage with complete testing, faster results, and better accuracy. It also helps reduce the time and audit costs with constant evidence collection. And since the process is automated, it frees you up to concentrate on riskier areas, issue remediation, and other impactful actions to strengthen cloud security. Setting up layers of security can help organizations to achieve the most visibility into their tech stack.