Cloud security monitoring refers to the ongoing surveillance, observation, analysis of cloud-based infrastructure and services to detect security threats, patch vulnerabilities, and address compliance gaps.
As cloud environments expand, organizations need effective cloud-based security monitoring tools to ensure those resources remain secured. Although existing security standards such as SIEM, SOAR, or IAM are all essential components of any security setup, the increasing adoption and prominence of the cloud in enterprise environments necessitate specialized tools to address the unique security challenges presented by cloud-based solutions.
While cloud-based security monitoring serves as an automated means to stay appraised of cloud environments, this must be supported by a skilled SOC team able to act upon collected data and manually address vulnerabilities, compliance issues, or other gaps in cybersecurity. Working in tandem, an appropriate deployment of cloud security monitoring solutions can significantly improve the efficiency of a human team of security professionals by both automating workloads and guiding decisions with relevant real-time insights.
How Cloud Security Monitoring Works
Cloud data aggregation
Cloud security monitoring relies on real-time data collection for insights and defense, including information related to network traffic, security events, system logs, and user activity. Effectively deployed cloud security monitoring solutions implement data collection agents across different sub-environments within the network to maintain oversight of the entire network with real-time metrics.
Threat detection via machine learning and pattern recognition
As aggregated data is gathered, cloud security monitoring solutions become better informed of threats targeting the environment as well as vulnerabilities and compliance issues. Continuous data collection then allows trends to emerge and be identified, enabling SOC teams to pinpoint and address the most pressing gaps in cybersecurity strategy.
Reporting and visibility features
Security monitoring in cloud computing also allow for real-time visibility into your cloud environment, functioning as a single pane of glass through which SOCs can view all ongoing activity across the network at once.
Real-time alerts and automated responses
Incident responses can be automated with security monitoring in the cloud as well, with specific events set to trigger a specific response such as isolating breached cloud environments or applying hot fixes to affected cloud infrastructure applications.
Remediation and incident response workflows
Cloud security monitoring tools can alert SOCs to unusual or potentially dangerous activity in their cloud environments, particularly activity warranting human intervention such as unexpected privilege escalation, reporting relevant real-time data to swiftly resolve the issue.
Benefits of Cloud Security Monitoring
Full visibility across cloud assets and services
Cloud security monitoring tools offer a solution against cloud sprawl via complete visibility across all your different environments, enabling real-time readouts of server traffic, access attempts, and any suspicious events across the server.
Real-time agentless threat detection and response
As your cloud-based security monitoring solution gathers data, it analyzes individual events to extrapolate trends. For example, in the event that an adversary is conducting reconnaissance of your servers, the solution will send high-priority alerts to all relevant SOC team members on the nature of the incident and recommended responses. These tools can also deploy automated responses in appropriate scenarios, such as isolating a compromised environment in the event of a breach.
Segmented views for Teams
Data collected by cloud-based monitoring tools is immediately analyzed and categorized to support segmented views for specific teams across your IT department. Dedicated staff can set a view limited to their particular sub-environment, or feeds can be retooled to deliver the select types of data relevant to that team’s purposes.
Simplified compliance
Enterprises must observe data storage laws such as HIPAA, the EU Data Protection Act, or PCI-DSS in handling data and files in the cloud. Cloud-based monitoring tools can be set to watch relevant data to note potential gaps in compliance, removing a significant time-consuming responsibility from SOC workloads.
Reduced risk of downtime and business disruption
Cloud security monitoring solutions provide the constant security to more reliably prevent downtime and disruption by constantly staying appraised of server traffic, key attack surfaces, and external activity, helping SOC teams better anticipate and guard against actual threats and more effectively maintain constant uptime.
Protection of sensitive data and IP
Data presents some of the most valuable resources an enterprise now holds. Robust monitoring tools help prevent these breaches by providing continuous assessments of what data has been access across the cloud and by whom to guard against improper access.
Optimized performance and cost management
Because cloud security monitoring solutions automatically handle rote matters like compliance auditing, they enable cybersecurity professionals to prioritize strategic tasks such as preparing complex incident responses or addressing major system vulnerabilities, driving greater efficiency and lower operational costs.
Integration with existing tools
As tools related to SIEM, IAM, CASB, and SOAR rely on input data, a well deployed cloud monitoring tool is the ideal support for their automated efforts. With complete insight across your environment, monitoring tools supply your existing stack with detailed information to identify unusual user behavior, create tailored cloud policies, and remediate events.
Architecture-agnostic support
Cloud surveillance software is also “architecture agnostic,” meaning it operates reliably with SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, DBaaS, or most other “as a service” offerings for a potential cloud setup. By its nature, the cloud offers a highly customizable range of deployments, and an effective cloud monitoring tool will support yours even with a high degree of customization.
Risk-based vulnerability prioritization
As they intake data, cloud security tools prioritize the most essential defenses relevant to your environment based on existing vulnerabilities and observed activity from the larger threat landscape. This allows for more efficient defenses while ensuring SOC teams are advised on the most relevant threats to the environment for a more reliable security posture.
ROI and Business Value of Cloud Security Monitoring
How monitoring supports digital transformation without compromising security
Without effective surveillance, cloud networks present an enormous liability for organizations, as they are left unaware of potential threats to the environment or even instances of actual attacks and breaches. Effective cloud monitoring is imperative as a means of maintaining control and oversight over cloud spaces, delivering critical insights into both system issues as well as potential external threats while better ensuring regulatory compliance over data handling.
Reduction in time to detect (MTTD) and respond (MTTR)
Because cloud-based security monitoring solutions constantly survey your environments, they allow for a near-instantaneous mean time to detect (MTTD) any ongoing incidents. Similarly, the mean time to respond (MTTR) to an incident will be drastically lowered as the tool deploys automated incident response measures and suggests best practices to address the incident.
Quantified reduction in compliance violations and breaches
Monitoring tools regularly scan for gaps in compliance, helping to mitigate regulatory and governance issues as they monitor your environments for potential violations, aggregating this information to recommend best practices to protect against compliance gaps and even data breaches before they occur.
Common Cloud Security Threats
Exposed S3 buckets and other misconfigurations
Many data exposure incidents in the cloud result from human error, one of the most common being exposed S3 buckets, wherein a cloud storage object is not set with restricted access. Other user errors, such as misconfigured firewalls or improperly set access credentials, can just as easily let attackers in through a figurative open window into your environment.
Reliable identity and access management (IAM) can be complicated in the cloud, as it can be difficult to apply consistent access privileges to prevent lateral movement or privilege escalation from an internal party. Constant visibility into your cloud system is critical to maintain best IAM practices and prevent unauthorized access from within and without your organization.
API vulnerabilities and unpatched systems
The APIs that cloud applications use APIs to interact with one another present an enormous attack surface for adversaries. Maintaining visibility over APIs and ensuring all systems have applied the latest updates is critical, and cloud monitoring solutions vastly simplify this responsibility by alerting SOCs to known vulnerabilities and unpatched applications.
Malware, hyperjacking, and zero-day exploits
The cloud’s an easy target for malicious software such as ransomware, and many adversaries also use malware to engage in hyperjacking, or a takeover of the hypervisor controlling the environments within virtual machines. Zero-day exploits, or threats present after install or a recent patch, also present a major vulnerability. Constant monitoring of your system’s file intake and information around that data is key to stay protected.
Data exfiltration and leakage
Unauthorized users can attain sensitive data within the cloud by bypassing access control measures, compromising access data, or installing malware. Data can also simply leak, such as if an employee unwittingly grants an external party access to internal systems. Tracking what data is accessed within your cloud system and by whom is essential to avoid these scenarios.
Shadow IT and zombie SaaS accounts
Unused cloud services and SaaS accounts may remain operational within the environment despite no longer being used internally, offering adversaries a potential attack vector under your radar of activity. Full insight into your cloud activity ensures SOCs can guard against such attacks via alerts about where more active deprovisioning would be beneficial.
Cloud Monitoring Challenges
Multi-cloud visibility limitations
A cloud environment from multiple providers can be difficult to monitor, as these various solutions will typically each have different proprietary monitoring software. Security monitoring in the cloud can overcome this issue by processing activity across all cloud systems, simplifying oversight while attaining insight from automated pattern recognition.
Alert Fatigue and excessive notifications
Given the enormous volume of data within a typical enterprise cloud environment, monitoring software may overload SOC dashboards with more information than they need, leaving teams confused as to which alerts necessitate further action. To ensure optimal readiness, alerts should be set to trigger only when it is directly relevant for enterprise security.
Contextual gap in logs and alerts
Without clear context to alerts, it can be unclear what steps they should prompt. When setting up alerts within a cloud monitoring tool, SOC teams must understand what systems they plan to monitor and why. Clearly defining the circumstances around a security incident, including the associated notifications, will keep teams far better prepared to resolve them.
Insider threat detection and IAM policy complexities
Cloud environments are ideal for internal threat actors to perform lateral movement attacks or privilege escalation, as in addition to often already having access to sensitive files, cloud systems provide additional camouflage for unusual user behavior. Stringent network analysis and robust IAM policies are essential to pick up on potentially illegitimate activity within your cloud systems, and cloud monitoring systems can support these policies through greater awareness into trends and activity among user accounts.
Scalability and data volume issues
Organizations may end up scaling cloud systems beyond what SOC teams expect to secure. Robust monitoring tools should be integrated into enterprise cloud expansion in order to avoid undermonitoring sub-environments within the cloud. It’s also critical to ensure new offerings can be fully aligned with internal security requirements to prevent future complications.
Cloud Monitoring vs. Cloud Observability
Cloud security monitoring is part of the larger practice of cloud monitoring, or having access to key data metrics within your cloud environment and being alerted to any changes. These security tools are important for the similar yet distinct practice of cloud observability, the practice of understanding your system’s health through log intake, traces, and data metrics.
Monitoring is essential at a system-wide level, and any security teams responsible for the health of the overall environment should be supported by effective surveillance tools to understand the system’s most relevant threats. Observability is best utilized by specialists, such as IT professionals responsible for securing a specific sub-environment or application, benefitting security efforts made at a more granular level.
Role of SIEM in Cloud Security Monitoring
Security information and event management (SIEM) is critical for any enterprise’s cyberdefenses, and it plays an especially important role within cloud security monitoring as a means of analyzing and acting upon aggregated data.
Centralized log Ingestion and normalization
As organizations’ cloud environments expand, centralized data ingestion platforms are extremely beneficial for SOC teams to monitor activity as well as potential vulnerabilities or breaches across all sectors. For actionable insights throughout the environment, this platform should normalize incoming data to ensure every log is standardized for uniform application.
Event correlation and behavioral analytics
Key analytics include analyzing events, traffic, and user behavior across your cloud environments to predict potential threats and identify ongoing trends. By processing data from as many parts of your cloud network as possible, monitoring tools can more reliably support SIEM with actionable data.
Detection of shadow resources or rogue servers
Cloud monitoring better enables IT teams to detect misappropriated use of the enterprise server. Unseen “shadow” resources, such as S3 buckets to support various services, or unidentified rogue servers can be established in cloud environments without official authorization, either as an attack vector or simply rogue employee action. With ongoing surveillance of your environment, cloud security tools can identify these illegitimate resources rather than let them continue to operate under the radar.
Choosing a Cloud Security Monitoring Solution
While the best cloud security monitoring tool for your enterprise will depend on your specific business objectives and security needs, these are some best practices to follow when choosing a solution.
Scalability and multi-cloud support
Ensure your monitoring solution aligns with your scope. An effective solution should be able to scale with your organization and integrate with different cloud providers for maximum efficiency and reliable growth.
Real-time alerting with minimal false positives
Your choice of security monitoring tool needs to be able to detect the most relevant data for your security team’s purposes in real time, utilizing filters and sub-views to offer specialized feeds for different teams. The tool should also be able to rule out false positives to provide a reliable readout for SOCs.
Automation and machine learning capabilities
Cloud security monitoring tools should be able to identify data patterns like unusual network traffic, suspicious network behavior, or excessive access requests. This additional insight into the cloud environment enables SOC teams to prioritize cloud defenses against relevant threats only with more purposeful defenses and counter measures.
Compliance and audit readiness
Make sure your selected tool can help you maintain compliance. A monitoring solution that conducts automated audits will more reliably ensure your organization adheres to legal requirements while reducing security team workloads.
Integration capabilities with your stack
Look for tools that integrate with your existing security offerings such as by sharing data or coordinating incident response efforts. A fully integrated security stack offers much more efficiency in its own operations and in how security teams use it.
How Netwrix Can Help
With a full range of tools for security, compliance, and management of your data security posture and access controls, Netwrix features a complete suite of cloud-based solutions to maintain constant surveillance of your enterprise cloud environments.
Designed for full integration with one another, this set of cyberdefense solutions aggregates and analyzes data from all corners of your network to ensure no threat is unassessed and no vulnerability goes unnoticed. With compliance audit solutions that slash preparation time by 85%, identity threat defenses, and tools to monitor and classify even hidden data, Netwrix offers a dynamic, fully scalable approach to cloud surveillance and security.
Conclusion
No enterprise IT effort can move ahead reliably without protections, and efforts to expand company cloud resources require robust monitoring tools to stay appraised of threats across expansive digital environments. Effective cloud security monitoring enables secure digital transformation by keeping SOC teams informed about activity across all different servers as well as recommending ways to remediate vulnerabilities and incidents—or, in many cases, apply fixes automatically.
As your cloud environments continually change, expand, and improve, it is essential to find ways for your monitoring tools to keep up. Visibility into new networks is key, but for maximum protection, digital transformation efforts must incorporate the best practices learned from ongoing cybersecurity efforts and minimize vulnerabilities from day one of each environment. Just as your software is meant to continuously improve in efficiency and flexibility, cybersecurity standards must feature the adaptability to apply new practices and protections as necessary.
