Although the agencies developed a plan for continuous monitoring, they did not always implement their plans. In addition, agencies partially implemented or did not implement the practice regarding service level agreements for some of the systems. Specifically, agencies’ service level agreements did not consistently define performance metrics, including how they would be measured, and the enforcement mechanisms. For the proper maintenance and operation of such apps, continuous monitoring at the cloud level is absolutely essential. This is due to the separation of concerns in microservices architectures and the need to ensure continuous network traffic flow and connectivity. The success of cloud-native microservices is determined by the ability to ensure real-time visibility and observability into every individual container across your technology stack.
There are many tools and different approaches on how to do this; application security is not anything new, it just must be re-examined when we consider it part of performing continuous monitoring on infrastructure. The good news is that IaC uses structured formats and common languages such as XML, JSON, and YAML. As a result, it is possible to use tools or even write custom scripts to perform the review. Code should undergo a security review when it changes, and thus the approved code can be continuously monitored.
Process areas
It renders you detailed insights into the performance and health of your cloud-hosted applications so that you may find and fix issues quickly. The effectiveness of cloud.gov’s continuous monitoring capability supports ongoing authorization and reauthorization decisions. Security-related information collected during continuous monitoring is used to make updates to the security authorization package. Updated documents provide evidence that FedRAMP baseline security controls continue to safeguard the system as originally planned.
The ability to quickly provision, configure, and secure resources with cloud providers has been key to the tremendous success and complexity of modern DevOps. We looked at how four agencies implemented key cloud security practices—like having a plan to respond to incidents. While the agencies implemented some of the security practices, none of them fully implemented all of the practices for their systems. Cloud services—on-demand access to shared resources such as networks, servers, and data storage—can help federal agencies deliver better IT services for less money. But without effective security measures, these services can make agencies vulnerable to risks such as cyberattacks. Zabbix automates the process of troubleshooting while providing root cause analysis to pinpoint vulnerabilities.
Sumo Logic’s continuous monitoring solution for cloud environments
Cloud computing provides agencies with potential opportunities to obtain IT services more efficiently; however, if not effectively implemented, it also poses cybersecurity risks. Automated monitoring solutions can quickly alert IT and security teams about anomalies and help identify patterns that point to risky or malicious behavior. Overall, this brings a deeper level of observability and visibility to cloud environments. It’s a challenge for organizations to manage and meet compliance requirements, so cloud security monitoring tools should provide robust auditing and monitoring capabilities. Monitoring is a must for any organization leveraging the cloud, both for security and performance, but choosing the right application performance monitoring (APM) solution can be challenging.
Advanced cloud security monitoring solutions should continuously monitor behavior in real time to quickly identify malicious activity and prevent an attack. Cloud security monitoring is the practice of continuously supervising both virtual and physical servers to analyze data for threats and vulnerabilities. Cloud security monitoring solutions often rely on automation to measure and assess behaviors related to data, applications and infrastructure.
It provides a unified insight to analyze, alert, and visualize occurrences and engagement metrics. It also offers comprehensive coverage, intelligent notifications, and aids with SLA reporting. Synthetic tests allow the company to find crucial information on the cloud continuous monitoring end user’s experience by imitating users from different locations. It determines page load time and delays, solves network traffic problems, and optimizes user interaction. ExoPrise also works to ensure SLA compliance for all your SaaS and Web applications.
- Leveraging logs also allows you to correlate authentication and network events (and compare those to benchmarks) and spot suspicious activities like brute force attacks, password spraying, SQL injection, or data exfiltration.
- Monitoring is a must for any organization leveraging the cloud, both for security and performance, but choosing the right application performance monitoring (APM) solution can be challenging.
- Boost confidence in compliance with a proactive, automated, and complete testing approach compared to manual, sample-based testing.
- Building IaC assets specifically for the purposes of performing security testing is a great option to leverage as well.
- Aternity is a top End User Experience (EUE) monitoring system that was acquired by Riverbed Technology in July 2016.
Check out this post to learn about the common mistakes IT management teams make when evaluating and implementing APM solutions. Read this article for tips on monitoring your noisy cloud neighbors and web apps with Stackify’s Retrace for APM. Finally, for some expert insights on the DevOps movement, server monitoring, and the cloud, this interview with Sean Hull is a must-read. Manage IQ is a cloud infrastructure monitoring tool that excels in discovering, optimizing, and controlling hybrid or multi-cloud IT environments. The monitoring tool enables continuous discovery as it provides round-the-clock advanced monitoring capabilities across virtualization containers, applications, storage, and network systems. Noted trends and models serve as diagnostic tools during real-time health monitoring and troubleshooting tasks.
The goal is to identify potential problems and threats in real time to address them quickly. Agency officials cited several reasons for their varied implementation of the key practices, including acknowledging that they had not documented their efforts to address the requirements. Cloud services enable resources to be allocated, consumed, and de-allocated on the fly to meet peak demands. Just about any system is going to have times where more resources are required than others, and the cloud allows compute, storage, and network resources to scale with this demand. As an example, within Coalfire we have a Security Parsing Tool (Sec-P) that spins up compute resources to process vulnerability assessment files that are dropped into a cloud storage bucket.
Similarly, you may need to find what capacity-related problems on your servers are most critical. Smart use of logs for continuous monitoring can greatly reduce the risk of cyberattacks. Mining historical system logs allows you to create performance, security, and user behavior benchmarks. Once you know how things should work, you’ll be better positioned to recognize anomalies from current log events. Continuous monitoring can be traced back to its roots in traditional auditing processes. These tools provide real-time insights into your application’s performance, user behavior, and error rates, enabling you to address issues before they escalate into full-blown problems proactively.