The increasing number of cyberattacks on servers, websites, and cloud applications has become a massive issue for many organizations. Even though organizations are taking stringent security measures, the volume of cyberattacks on cloud services is continuing to rise.
With the increasing number of cyberattacks, the need for monitoring of cloud security and management has become more than ever. To mitigate all the potential risks, you need cloud security monitoring that helps an organization administer both virtual and physical servers by assessing all the data for threats.
It has emerged as one of the best practices to mitigate emerging threats and vulnerabilities and prevent costly breaches. To help you learn more about it, we have come up with a detailed article regarding what cloud security monitoring is. We will also learn various other facts in this article, and they are:
- How Does Cloud Security Monitoring Work?
- Benefits of Cloud Security Monitoring.
- How Can You Use SIEM for Cloud Security Monitoring?
- SIEM Use Cases for Cloud Security Monitoring.
- Cloud Security Monitoring with CloudDefense.AI.
What is Cloud Security Monitoring?
Cloud security monitoring is the practice that enables organizations to continuously monitor virtual and physical servers to assess for any kind of vulnerabilities. It combines both automated and manual processes to monitor and review the security of applications, servers, websites, and platforms.
It also helps in managing operation workflow in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments and allows experts to identify vulnerabilities quickly. Cloud security monitoring quantifies the data and application behavior across the cloud infrastructure and platform functions to enhance overall security.
The primary goal is to minimize cyberattacks, curb security breaches, and negate operational delay, which ultimately leads to optimum business continuity. More than revenue loss, many organizations are concerned about the reputational damage caused by cyberattacks, but cloud security monitoring has been able to help them protect their integrity and reputations.
When an organization adopts cloud security monitoring, not only does it curb security risks, but it also enhances overall data accessibility, privacy, and protection. Having this allows investors, customers, and shareholders to enjoy better transparency.
In general, cloud security monitoring is externally added to the cloud infrastructure. However, there are some cloud platforms where it is implemented into server hosting and applications.
How Does Cloud Security Monitoring Work?
Cloud security monitoring works in a simple manner where it monitors and reviews both physical and virtual servers of an organization’s cloud environment. Cloud security monitoring leverages automated as well as manual tools and services to help the security team with the monitoring and reviewing capabilities.
It also utilizes SIEM tools to provide alerts and notifications regarding any possible threat during the assessment process. Some of these solutions often leverage third-party security management tools to enhance the assessment process and reduce the chance of cloud breaches.
The tool accumulates all the log data from the server and analyses them to provide alerts to the team regarding security management configurations. There are some cloud security monitoring that work by providing comprehensive visibility into the infrastructure and performing zero-day vulnerability assessments.
This advanced solution comes with the capability to analyze a large volume of data in real time to provide insight regarding security threats. It can seamlessly integrate with varied applications, websites, and servers and perform audits regarding vulnerabilities.
Nowadays, some of the vendors have come up with cloud security monitoring solutions that can create reports regarding assessments and help the organization enhance its overall security. It can also monitor and review log files, sources, databases, and servers, providing insights regarding possible vulnerabilities and threats.
Benefits of Cloud Security Monitoring
Cloud security monitoring is all about enhancing the security posture of an organization and helping the organization mitigate possible security threats. However, there are many other benefits this security solution has on offer, and they are:
Identifying Vulnerabilities
One of the primary benefits of cloud security monitoring is its capability to identify vulnerabilities through automation. Through automated monitoring, it can detect issues and provide alerts to security and also help the team to discover malicious patterns. It provides a deep insight into the cloud environment.
Compliance Maintenance
Cloud security monitoring is instrumental for organizations in maintaining compliance with all the key industry regulations like PCI DSS, GDPR, and HIPAA. Organizations are using this solution to cater to the requirement of constant monitoring and prevent legal issues.
Complete Customizability
Most cloud security monitoring solutions can seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructure, and that too, without hindering security capabilities. Since this solution fits seamlessly with most of the cloud solutions and local compliance, this makes it a safe option for every organization.
Quick Response to Threat
Another huge advantage of this monitoring solution is that it utilizes real-time scanning and assessment to provide quick response to threats. Once it detects any anomaly or malicious behavior, it quickly provides an alert to the team and enables the organization to mitigate quickly.
Safeguard All Vital Data
Implementing cloud security monitoring allows organizations to perform audits at regular intervals and get a complete view of the security posture, which ultimately helps protect all vital data. It helps the team to keep track of all the security systems and provide recommendations if any area needs to be improved.
Complete Automation
Automated assessment and monitoring of the cloud security posture of these solutions helps every organization as it saves them a lot of resources. Automation, not only allows the team to save time but also utilizes resources for other productive work.
Better Decision-Making Capabilities
Cloud security monitoring solutions utilize various tools to provide real-time assessment of data and allow organizations to gain deep insight into the data. This ultimately helps the top brass of the organization get accurate information and improve their decision-making capabilities.
Enhances Security Maturity
When an organization integrates cloud security monitoring into their existing infrastructure it helps them to enhance their security approach. It allows organizations to include an additional layer of security to the overall security system and get complete visibility into the whole cloud environment.
How Can You USE SIEM for Cloud Security Monitoring?
SIEM tools serve as an important aspect of modern security as they serve as an overlay and help safeguard the cloud environment from all kinds of threats. SIEMs are highly useful in understanding vast volumes of data coming from different data streams in varied formats.
It accumulates all the data and normalizes them before storing them. It also comes with the correlation and aggregation of data capability that ultimately provides security insight and delivers alerts for quick response. SIEM can work seamlessly with Windows, Linux, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL servers to retrieve data and generate actional insight for the team.
When the team maps the log and event data to the compliance framework, SIEM can come in handy to automate the audit and provide compliance reporting, which ultimately helps during compliance audits.
During cloud security monitoring, SIEM can be utilized to investigate threats. Since it enables the team to assess historical data, correlating events, and pivot analysis, SIEM helps them to quickly uncover the main cause and impact of a particular security incident.
Two primary examples of SIEM helping team to identify security threats are:
Example 1
SIEM is highly useful in discovering insider threats in an organization. When an employee accidentally promotes their user privilege to an administrator through misconfiguration, SIEM can be useful in discovering the threat.
It can correlate the promotion of privilege from user to administrator with the login behavior and identify the possible attack that can originate from the misconfiguration.
Example 2
Organizations can utilize SIEM to discover malicious resources that can create a pathway for attackers. Suppose a cloud server accidentally starts in an organization; it will not only jeopardize the overall security posture but also allow attackers to exploit it for security breaches.
However, when an organization has SIEM in place, it will allow them to detect the new server, and it will correlate its availability from the malware scanning tool. While correlating the information, it will be able to detect that the new cloud server is not audited, which can lead to serious security threats.
SIEM Use Cases for Cloud Security Monitoring
SIEM solutions play a crucial role in cloud security monitoring because they enable it to detect security incidents and provide appropriate responses. SIEM comes with capabilities that allow them to identify vulnerabilities and threats from everyday monitoring activities. By assessing information from events like user permission escalation, service flow, bandwidth usage, and login events, it can easily detect malicious threats. Here are some SIEM use cases for cloud security monitoring:
Detecting Malicious Login Event
SIEM comes with the capability to detect malicious logins to the server without using the designated key. It can identify the change in login behavior and provide a report accordingly.
This kind of event usually occurs when the user no longer has authorized access to certain resources and is exploring the data with malicious intent. It can also detect unexpected privilege escalation of users for accessing sensitive information.
Correlating Events
Security teams and administrators, through SIEM, can detect different events that don’t have individual significance, but when they are correlated, it can lead to possible security incidents.
When a new instance is created and fails the security scan, it might seem like a simple misconfiguration issue. However, SIEM correlates it with other anomalies or security incidents in the environment to discover security issues.
Identifying User Privilege
SIEM solution plays a vital role in cloud security monitoring as it can identify user privilege. When an SIEM is implemented in a cloud environment, it can identify users who have access to specific functions that must be accessed by others.
If a marketing department gets access to certain financial documents that must be handled only by the accounting department, SIEM can detect such unauthorized privilege.
Cloud Trail Logging and Analysis
SIEM solution can collect AWS CloudTrail logs from a range of accounts and assess various security events to detect potential threats and malicious activities. It also analyzes all the API calls during monitoring and identifies security threats across the cloud services.
Network Traffic Analysis
When an organization utilizes the SIEM solution for cloud security monitoring, it helps in monitoring network traffic within the environment and detecting anomalies. It performs extensive network analysis and correlates malicious communications to discover network-based security threats.
Container Security Monitoring
With an SIEM solution, monitoring container orchestration platforms becomes easy for the organization, and it can easily detect security events from them. SIEM is highly suitable for cloud environments utilizing containerized applications as it allows them to detect vulnerabilities and malicious activities.
Cloud Security Monitoring with CloudDefense.AI
In modern times, most organizations have their applications, services, or websites in the cloud. Overseeing cloud security can be a huge hassle for many, but CloudDefense.AI, with its cutting-edge cloud security monitoring, eases up everything.
CloudDefense.AI can seamlessly integrate with your existing system and deliver automated monitoring capabilities. Besides, CloudDefense.AI is equipped with various analyzing tools that assess a large volume of data to provide actionable insight to the team and help them identify issues.
It also delivers accurate intelligence to the team so that they can make data-driven decisions to improve the posture of their security. This platform leverages CNAPP and ensures all threats are effectively eliminated while maintaining compliance.
From PCI DSS, GDPR, and HIPAA to NIST, CloudDefense.AI helps you with compliance monitoring for all top industry standards and regulations. It is an industry-leading agentless platform that delivers CSPM, CIEM, vulnerability management, and threat detection for continuous cloud security monitoring. Once the solution detects any anomaly or vulnerability, this platform utilizes AI-based Auto Remediation capability to secure the cloud and application environment.
Conclusion
Cloud security monitoring is a boon for modern organizations operating in the cloud, and it has saved them from thousands of possible cyber threats. The primary key to effective cloud security monitoring is a proactive approach to cloud security and leveraging automation tools.
Cloud security monitoring platforms like CloudDefense.AI make things easy for most organizations by implementing automation in their workflow and improving their overall security posture. This solution is completely customizable according to the organization’s requirements, and you can combine various tools to enhance the overall security posture.
Anshu Bansal, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist, currently co-founds CloudDefense.AI, a cybersecurity solution with a mission to secure your business by rapidly identifying and removing critical risks in Applications and Infrastructure as Code. With a background in Amazon, Microsoft, and VMWare, they contributed to various software and security roles.
