What is cloud security monitoring?
Cloud security monitoring is the series of processes that an organization adopts to monitor the security of their infrastructure and data in the cloud. It is a combination of manual and automatic processes to track assets like servers, applications, virtual networks, and web apps, among others. It is mainly done to make sure that the data is not tampered with, and that there is no unauthorized access to the company's networks. But it does not stop at that.
Within cloud monitoring, cloud security monitoring is the part that monitors security-related aspects of a cloud infrastructure. Cloud security monitoring tools are apt to identify security threats, discover possible vulnerabilities in your codebase, detect suspicious accesses, and monitor the data and cloud resources on an ongoing basis.
It goes without saying how important the security of your data and resources is. Security monitoring in cloud computing is only part of what can ensure it though, with the larger efforts being comprised under a larger series of processes that fall under the cloud security management term.
What is cloud security management?
Cloud security management is a set of processes and practices to ensure the security and protection of data, applications and any other resources you may be using in a cloud service. Whereas cloud security monitoring is worried about continuously checking the security of the monitored resources, cloud security management goes beyond the monitoring part, including practices that prevent security threats, like data encryption or risk assessment.
These practices are not set up in a vacuum but must follow industry standards. Adhering to these standards help organizations to establish a comprehensive and effective cloud security management program that can secure their data and resources. By being compliant to one or more of these standards shows the commitment of a company to security to customers, stakeholders, and regulators. Standards like ISO 27001, SOC 2, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, PCI DSS and more, help companies to set up a cloud security management strategy, which inevitably will include cloud security monitoring.
Cloud security posture management
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is a type of tool that identifies security risks in a cloud infrastructure. That includes any of the most common cloud models, like software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and serverless code. "Posture" in this context means readiness to mitigate attacks, a quantity that tells us of how a system is able to avoid or contain security attacks. Within a cloud security management setup, a CSPM tool is implemented to act as an inspector that can find potential safety hazards in cloud-hosted software.
Similarly to cloud security monitoring tools, a CSPM tool scans and constantly analyzes the infrastructure to detect possible problems. These may be security misconfigurations, possible compliance violations, and many vulnerabilities. Such tools usually also map the entire organization's infrastructure to reveal potential unknown, yet, risks. Most CSPM tools are multi-cloud, able to scan multiple cloud services, for a combined view of security issues in your cloud environments.
Cloud security risk management
Cloud security risk management is the practice of managing, prioritizing, and acting on risks that may affect cloud infrastructures. It is an important part of cloud security management, and often included in security monitoring tools.
In practice cloud security risk management involves a few steps. First, identifying assets, which is very easily done with monitoring tools like Checkmk that support auto-discovery of resources. Then identifying threats, potential causes of issues to the assets, is affected, tying risks to known threats and vulnerabilities. The risks are prioritized, by analyzing the existing threat landscape and considering how threats may evolve. Lastly, and this is where a good cloud security monitoring solution helps, it is established how to be alerted and how to act upon discovered threats.
Acting will necessarily involve disaster planning and recovery, backup restoring, and incident response planning. Cloud security risk management includes all this, with cloud security monitoring playing a vital part in preventing incidents and disasters. As with the whole cloud security management, monitoring is key to know how your infrastructure is implemented and if your security plans are sound.
The importance of cloud security monitoring
From what we have seen it becomes clear why cloud security monitoring is important. It plays an important role in the middle of others, helping with risk management, cloud security posture management, and cloud threat detection, to name just a few. Security monitoring tools may not include all the features to make them a comprehensive tool that can put your cloud infrastructure in security from all risks, though. Generally monitoring tools focus on the monitoring part of cloud security, which is wide and complex on its own. Often security monitoring tools have a few overlapping features that are valid in enabling security that is not just monitoring.
Detecting vulnerabilities is one area where cloud security monitoring tools can directly help in improving security. Unusual traffic, either from suspicious origins or through supposedly closed firewall ports, may mean an unknown vulnerability, and a monitoring tool can pick it up for you. If you had not one set up, you would not be aware of this potential threat.
A cloud security monitoring solution can prevent loss of business by ensuring business continuity and data security. An overlooked security incident may cause data leaks or even in shutting down of business operations, with obvious consequences. With such a solution set up, your cloud administrators could be alerted in time and act accordingly. The principle remains that if you are not aware of it, you cannot fix it. Security monitoring tools make you aware of how your cloud resources and services are operating, and can save you hours of business disruptions.
The complexity of cloud environments is in itself one of the main points in favor of implementing a cloud security monitoring tool. Multi-cloud environments, hybrid infrastructures, and the wealth of resources and services made available by cloud vendors, make for a great quantity of interconnected pieces that are exposed to external threats. These need to communicate in a safe manner, and cloud administrators need to pay attention that this is the case. Thus, avoiding misconfiguring any service, being aware of their statuses at all times, and being notified of misbehaviours. The more important parts of your infrastructure run on this multitude of pieces.
Therefore, security monitoring in cloud computing is a critical effort that every organization should undertake as soon as cloud services play an important role in their workloads. A reliable monitoring tool like Checkmk can help you in being aware of how your cloud-based infrastructure is performing, and if there are errors happening. Together with tools for cloud security posture management and a sound plan for risk management, Checkmk is a critical tool for ensuring the best performance and security for your cloud environments.
FAQ
What is cloud security analytics?
Cloud security analytics refers to the combination of tools used to identify and troubleshoot security events that may threaten your IT infrastructure. It is affected by gathering security-related events in order to understand and analyze those who pose the greatest risk, and proactively avoiding them.
What is cloud threat hunting?
Threat hunting is an umbrella term that encompasses techniques and tools that are used to identify cyber threats. Modern cloud threat hunting is both a manual analysis of possible or already happened security threats, and the use of an automated tool that analyzes systems for you. Usually threat hunting is only reactive, acting after an attack, but more recently it has become increasingly proactive, trying to detect potential security threats before they happen.