What is cloud security monitoring?
Cloud security monitoring is an automated process of continuously assessing physical and virtual servers to analyze data for threats and vulnerabilities in cloud-based environments. It’s an essential component of cloud computing security that allows companies to observe, review, and manage operational workflows in the entire cloud infrastructure, including database and software platforms.
This post dives further to explore how cloud security monitoring works, the best practices to protect sensitive data, and the benefits and drawbacks of security monitoring in cloud computing. It also explains how Parallels® RAS can help you enhance security monitoring in the cloud.
Function of security monitoring in cloud computing
Like security information and event management (SIEM), cloud security monitoring solutions work by gathering log data across multiple servers. An advanced security monitoring tool can help you enhance responses to security incidents by processing and correlating the collected data for any anomalous activity in real-time.
Besides enhancing incident responses, IT teams can use the generated alerts to help investigate and detect early threats. In addition, you can leverage cloud security monitoring tools to support compliance use cases, since many regulatory bodies require companies to keep their audit logs for up to one year.
There are three basic approaches to cloud security monitoring. First, you can do it in the cloud server hosting infrastructures, like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Watch or Azure Monitor. Using such a cloud-native security monitoring tool lets you take full advantage of cloud computing.
Second, you can leverage an on-premises tool to diagnose and solve performance issues in your cloud platform. Unlike cloud-based tools that are solely managed by cloud service providers (CSPs), the management of on-premises security monitoring solutions is undertaken by in-house IT teams.
Third, you could use a third-party service provider in your cloud platform to monitor cloud security risks. When used in a cloud-based environment, cloud monitoring solutions should provide various capabilities, including:
- Scalability. The software needs to scale up to monitor large volumes of data generated by the company across multiple distributed locations.
- Visibility. The software needs to provide allowing IT teams to gain complete visibility into the performance and health of the enterprise’s workloads.
- Timeliness. Cloud security monitoring tools need to offer continuous monitoring capabilities, ensuring that new or modified data is scanned in real-time.
- Integration. Ideally, the cloud security monitoring software needs to integrate with virtually all the organization’s existing tools and services to achieve maximum visibility. You should select a solution that seamlessly integrates with your existing productivity suites, such as Microsoft 365 or identity and access management (IAM) solutions like Okta single sign-on (SSO).
- Auditing and reporting. A robust cloud monitoring tool needs to provide auditing and reporting capabilities to help the organization adhere to regulations and compliance requirements specific to that industry.
Best practices for effective cloud security monitoring
As powerful as cloud computing may be, it may not help you impact the organization’s bottom line, especially if it’s poorly implemented. To make cloud security effective, you must think strategically and adhere to best practices. Below are a few of the best practices that can help your monitoring capabilities:
- Strict data control measures. Gaining complete visibility and control over data across all endpoints is one of the measures you need to take to mitigate cloud security risks. Using solutions that assess the risk and act on the data source before the threat transitions to the cloud environment enables robust defense against cybersecurity breaches.
- Secure code. When building an application, the focus should be on selecting the appropriate security development lifecycle (SDL) that aligns with the organization’s delivery strategy. Such a strategy provides numerous benefits, including continuous security, threat detection, and stakeholder awareness.
- Patch management. Patch management is an essential component of securing cloud-based environments. As such, you need to implement it with a detailed organization process that is both security- focused and cost-effective.
- Automation. Automated security monitoring solutions can complete tedious and time-consuming tasks that often take up the time of IT professionals, enabling them to focus on high-value tasks. It can also enhance threat detection, eliminate errors and guesswork, and decrease incidence response time when utilized in specific cloud security monitoring processes.
- Identity and access management. IAM solutions are essential components of cloud services that allow IT teams to control which employees can access the enterprise resources. They provide role-based access (RBA) control that allows IT teams to regulate access to networks and applications based on employees’ roles within the company. In this regard, companies must ensure that the security policies formulated are attached to roles or groups rather than individual employees to restrict excessive or unnecessary privileges to users.
- Data protection measures. Companies need to adopt a comprehensive security strategy that addresses data vulnerabilities in cloud environments to enhance their overall security posture. While data encryption is enabled in most CSPs by default, you need to look for a vendor that provides additional control, such as hardware security module (HSM)-enabled services or third parties to protect data—whether in transit or at rest.
Advantages of cloud security monitoring
Security monitoring in cloud computing has many benefits that can promote the business’s bottom line. Some of these benefits include:
- Discovering vulnerabilities. IT teams need to maintain complete visibility over cloud environments to identify threats. An automated monitoring tool can help employees quickly send alerts to IT teams for possible identification of suspicious behaviors and patterns in the enterprise network.
- Protecting sensitive data. Cloud security monitoring solutions usually perform regular audits that help keep enterprise data secure. You could leverage these solutions to monitor the health of the organization’s workloads and receive periodic recommendations that boost the overall security of the network.
- Maintaining compliance. Most regulatory requirements, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), require companies to monitor their systems regularly. Organizations that leverage cloud solutions in such sectors can use monitoring capabilities to comply with regulations and avoid penalizations.
- Ensuring business continuity. Cybersecurity incidents can disrupt the operations of a business and force the organization to shut down altogether. This not only negatively impacts customer trust and satisfaction but also affects the organization’s overall reputation. Automated monitoring tools are essential components for cloud security services because they help maintain business continuity and overall data security.
- Leveraging continuous monitoring and support. A cloud security monitoring solution can help you increase the transparency and visibility of cloud services, especially suspicious activities that could indicate a breach. A solution that monitors your workloads 24/7 can also mitigate the risk of such attacks quickly.
Challenges with cloud security monitoring
Despite the benefits—including enhanced IT efficiency, scalability, and agility—that come with cloud computing, organizations must address the security challenges associated with these services. Security is a significant challenge in cloud-based environments because of the shared responsibility model, and most companies can’t delineate where their responsibilities start and CSPs’ responsibilities end.
Common cloud security challenges that organizations are likely to face include the following:
- Cloud security strategy deficiencies. Because of cloud computing benefits, many businesses hastily transition to cloud-based environments without developing a clear security strategy. For example, many organizations don’t take the time to understand how they gain visibility into their cloud environments or keep track of their assets. Without a sound cloud migration strategy, an organization can’t fully reap the advantages of a cloud security monitoring solution.
- Alert fatigue. Some cloud security monitoring solutions can be noisy, resulting in a lack of insights by the IT teams on what is essential to focus on. For example, a monitoring solution that generates up to 10,000 alerts per month without prioritizing them makes no business sense for an organization. Using cloud security monitoring software that prioritizes the alerts can minimize the possibility of receiving false positives, providing a higher security value in cloud-based ecosystems.
- Contextualization issues. Alerts and logs can only make business sense if IT teams understand their meaning. IT teams need to understand why they are monitoring the system and what actions to take whenever the platform generates an alert. An enterprise-grade monitoring solution provides not only prioritized alerts but also remediation steps.
Efficient cloud security monitoring with Parallels RAS
Digitization is no longer a catchphrase that companies use to associate with attaining competitive advantage. Organizations need to digitize their operations through solutions such as cloud computing to reduce costs, improve efficiencies, increase customer satisfaction, and more.
In the recent past, cloud-based applications have become increasingly prevalent as organizations race to embrace hybrid working environments. Meanwhile, cybersecurity attacks are increasing while more businesses embrace these solutions. Parallels RAS is an all-in-one virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and advanced cloud monitoring solution that organizations can leverage to efficiently monitor security in cloud-based environments.
In addition to supporting major hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) deployments, Parallels RAS also supports private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, simplifying the cloud migration process. Using Parallels RAS, organizations can ensure that all employees have secure access to the enterprise assets on any endpoint.
The platform also provides out-of-the-box cloud security solutions, including multi-factor authentication (MFA), granular filtering, role-based access control (RBAC), and client policies that IT teams can leverage to remediate data security risks. It also seamlessly integrates with SSO solutions like Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), OAuth, and OpenID.
Try Parallels RAS today and experience how efficiently it enhances cloud security monitoring!
