The Importance of Monitoring and Auditing in Cloud Security

The Importance of Monitoring and Auditing in Cloud Security

Cloud Security monitoring involves constantly assessing the analyzing IT cloud infrastructure for vulnerabilities and threats. Considering the need for cloud security, it has become a global $153 billion market. You need to supervise both physical and virtual servers to ensure strict monitoring. Cloud Security architecture refers to the hardware, procedures, and policies that protect data, applications, and network infrastructure from cyberattacks. Monitoring and auditing are the two main components of a strategy for cloud security architecture. 

 

Besides keeping the system safe from attacks, it also ensures that no information is accessible by any unauthorized server. These two functions mainly rely on the log data that is collected across servers, similar to SIEM tools. The server administrators are instantly alerted when a security breach is detected. Following are some of the best advantages of monitoring and auditing in cloud security.

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Security Automation

You can create automated security workflows by integrating security automation tools and auditing and monitoring tools. Organizations can respond to security breach incidents much more efficiently and quickly by automating repetitive security tasks. The cases of human mistakes and negligence are also minimized due to the reduction in the need for manual intervention.

 

At times, cloud security automation features are built into the company’s hosting platform as an additional feature. Other times, you must add this function to the existing infrastructure externally. Other key cloud security components include data security, identity, data retention and protection policies, access management solutions, and legal compliance. 

Security Automation in cloud security

Maintain Compliance

Incorporating the monitoring and auditing practices in your cloud security strategy can help you ensure compliance with industry regulations such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and SOC 2. Following these practices regularly also ensures the effective implementation of these controls.

 

Maintaining compliance in your cloud infrastructure can help you avoid fraud, lost customers, damaged reputations, financial penalties, and losses caused due to data losses and security breaches. It ensures that your organization is able to mitigate cybersecurity risks at all times.

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Identify Threats

You can identify potential vulnerabilities and threats through regular monitoring and auditing to ensure that your workloads are safe. It also helps you identify any misconfigurations that might pose a threat to your cloud network. This is done by detecting the signs of any suspicious activity, such as excessive data usage, failed login attempts, etc. 

 

Continuous monitoring and auditing can also help you with risk assessment. You can start by leveraging the built-in threat detection cloud platforms provide. This will allow you to use baselining and behavior analytics to improve your cloud visibility. Ultimately, you’ll be able to detect threats at all the layers of the cloud, including network traffic, workloads, identities, applications, and data-related behaviors.

cloud security Identify Threats

Early Detection

You can reduce potential damages to your cloud network by the early detection of security incidents. For example, by monitoring and auditing your cloud infrastructure on a regular basis, you can instantly be alerted when a hacker has gained access to your cloud environment. In this way, you can minimize the extent of the damage. Identity Lifecycle Management (ILM) can aid in early detection by providing visibility into user access and privileges over time, enabling quick identification of any unauthorized or suspicious access.

 

Attackers specifically target cloud-based solutions because of the organization’s lack of visibility over them. Visibility is a cloud security strategy that is meant to understand and utilize log data for improved security. In addition to this, organizations may face challenges in managing access restrictions in a cloud environment.

cloud security Early Detection

Continuous Monitoring

Security auditing and monitoring are ongoing processes that keep you to stay ahead of emerging vulnerabilities and threats. They keep a strict check of your entire technology environment all year long. As soon as there is any deviation from your security baseline, the responsible parties are instantly alerted.

 

Continuous monitoring can help you identify your cloud infrastructure’s high-priority and vulnerable areas. Based on this information, you can determine the process frequency and rules for auditing. It also helps you configure the parameters required to execute the audit.

Cost optimization

Implementing the right monitoring and auditing strategies can help you reduce or rightsize your overall cloud spending. One of the goals of auditing in cloud security is to understand the resources that the applications consume across computing, storage, and network. This helps the company in multidimensional rightsizing, one of the core principles required to optimize cost. Many cloud security platforms have built-in cost optimization tools which help companies identify the areas with excessive spending.  

 

Ensuring that the resources are cost-effective and performing well allows the companies to make real-time vertical and horizontal scale decisions. Monitoring also identifies any unused resources and cleans up the estate. This ensures optimal cloud storage utilization, which also contributes to cost optimization. 

Scalability and Integration

Using cloud services lets you increase your workload with existing hardware resources. Incorporating good monitoring and auditing practices in your cloud security can enhance the integrity and security of your cloud data. 

 

These practices also ensure the scalability of your cloud data, considering that you can monitor large volumes of data across many distributed locations. You can increase or decrease IT resources as needed based on the data gathered through auditing. This ensures that your applications run smoothly, even during traffic spikes. One of the best features of using the cloud is that you can carry out scaling activities with little to no disruption or downtime.

 

Monitoring and auditing let you consolidate data from different sources into a single space. This gives you a unified and more valuable view of it. Data integration can help in various aspects of cloud computing, which includes marketing, database replication, IoT, data warehousing, and data lake development. Besides data, cloud computing platforms also allow you to integrate your preferred monitoring tools with them.

cloud security Scalability and Integration

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Conclusion

If you’re using a cloud environment, it is imperative to have an exceptional monitoring system to track usage and ensure that your applications run optimally. Understanding the importance of monitoring and auditing in cloud security can help businesses develop a roadmap that considers internal and external security factors. 

Author: Muhammed

Muhammed is a freelancer writer based with 3 years of experience under his belt. He writes most often at home and at tech. When not writing, he enjoys reading and adventuring. Say hi on FB @abbasceey
 

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