What Should You Know About Cloud Security Monitoring


Moving to the cloud has its advantages, and most businesses are anxious about cost savings and rapid scalability, which cloud adoption promises.

However, in your hurry to move to the cloud, you may be forgetting the security aspect. Although you may have an inbuilt cloud security monitoring mechanism, it is often insufficient to cover your distributed cloud environment.

The fact is that cloud security is an entirely different ball game that carries its own set of unique risks. The onus is on your IT team to ensure that your cloud solutions are secure enough and compatible with the network’s existing security arrangement.
To have a foolproof cloud security monitoring system in place, you need to follow certain critical controls.

Bird’s Eye View of your Cloud Infrastructure

It is critical that your cloud security includes a bird’s eye view of your security policies, configuration, and day-to-day activities of the users. Remember that your online data stores are strife with security risks lurking at all times. Such security risks can breach the security system and make your team very vulnerable to security breaches due to incorrect configuration or abnormal activity indicating an attack.

With different cloud settings offering unique cloud settings, there is a constant challenge for your security team. Gaining visibility through such instances is indeed a daunting task.

Centralized visibility into your cloud infrastructure is the answer to such challenges. You may deploy efficient cloud workload protection tools, which help by integrating perfectly into your cloud security monitoring and management system.

Such tools grant your security team the power to continually monitor and report the configuration status along with the overall security status of your cloud environment. When your security monitoring is automated, it is easy for your IT team to spot any misconfiguration and tighten security.

Integrating with Vendor Security System

The unique difference between a traditional data center and a cloud computing setup is that the latter is based on a shared model, where the security responsibility is shared equally.

Unless you coordinate closely with your cloud workload protection and the cloud environment, visibility into your cloud posture gets hampered. What it takes is API level integration into popular tools like VPC Flow logs, Amazon Inspector or GuardDuty (AWS), Stack Event or Flow Drivers (Google Cloud), and Security Center (Microsoft Azure).

Combo of Web Application Layer Protection with AI

If you plan to move your operations to the cloud, you need to keep in mind that the security of applications deployed and data stored in your cloud are your sole responsibility. Cloud providers shoulder the responsibility only for the infrastructure.

It would help if you tightened the security for your web applications with fortified firewalls. When an app runs on the cloud, control of access to any particular IP address does not work the way it works in a data center. It would help if you relied on the enhanced computing power and speed of AI for protecting your cloud-based applications.

It is vital to detect threats in the application content rather than in the traffic. Such threat detection is possible only with granular adjustments that are difficult to handle manually. It takes the power of AI to counter threats to today’s cloud-based applications.
Also, Machine Learning helps in detecting unnatural app behavior that indicates a security threat.

Automating Security Operations

There is a vast gap in cyber-security skills, with the current situation being far from enough to provide adequate security in today’s fast-paced world. With cyber-security experts hard to come by, you are exposed and remain vulnerable to a plethora of security threats.

Automating your security operations is the only way to overcome such security threats. A popular and straightforward approach has been found through plugins that offer administrators better visibility, enabling automation and easy management, leading to enhanced security. Your IT and DevOps teams need to remain updated and keep a vigilant eye on their security policies.

Threat Intelligence Feeds

Using the services of multiple providers can make your cloud environment a complex maze as they have their security platforms. Such a multiple-vendor scenario makes your cloud environment more vulnerable to threats. Ideal cloud security under such circumstances is possible only if you have a comprehensive solution, bringing in all your providers under one umbrella.

An ideal solution would incorporate significant threat intelligence feeds featuring a high-level intelligence of all security events.

Summing it Up

A combination of the above points will help your IT and security teams have a tight leash on your cloud security monitoring system. With cloud applications becoming popular, cloud security controls need to be in place to prevent unprecedented compromises.


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