Security
3 min read
As organization's IT infrastructures continue to grow in size and complexity, this raises the challenge of guaranteeing security across your resources, systems, and networks. The importance of this is further increased due to data being a valuable commodity in today's world. The loss of data due to a security breach could send seismic repercussions through your entire organization and potentially lead to its demise.
However, it isn't all bad news as there are multiple solutions to protect your IT environments from malicious attacks. The main solution is security monitoring. Security monitoring is the term that encompasses the processes for finding threats and managing security incidents.
Security monitoring allows your IT team to proactively take precautions and implement preventive measures, anticipating potential attacks before they can occur. It entails continuously evaluating a company’s network and other types of IT infrastructure to find potential security risks and guarantee secure data transfers.
Within this article, we will outline what security monitoring is, along with some best practices and use cases of security monitoring to enable you to comprehend why you should utilise the solution.
Contents
What is Security Monitoring?
Security Monitoring can be defined as the continual and structured observation of an organization's information systems, networks, and resources to highlight and respond to potential security threats or incidents. It entails the utilisation of multiple tools, technologies, and processes to find abnormal or suspicious activities, offering insights into potential security risks.
The main objective of security monitoring is to improve the entire cybersecurity posture by highlighting and rectifying vulnerabilities, reducing the impact of security incidents, and guaranteeing the protection of sensitive data and resources.
Security Monitoring: Best Practises
To aid your understanding of security monitoring as well as ensure that you utilize the solution effectively, we have devised a list of the solutions’ best practices.
Outline objectives and identify the data you aim to protect: Clearly outline the objectives and goals of your security monitoring program and understand potential risks and threats. Also, there’s a finite amount of time that you can allocate to security monitoring. Improve the efficiency of security monitoring by deciding which data and infrastructure is most crucial to your organisation, and prioritise its protection.
Focus on continuous monitoring: Set out continuous, real-time monitoring capabilities to quickly find and respond to security incidents. This can include monitoring network traffic, system logs, and user activities. It’s important here to focus on endpoints as malicious individuals from the outside utilize these endpoints first to carry out attacks.
Utilize Security Monitoring tools: Streamline your security activities by utilizing a security monitoring solution, such as Logit.io’s. This can help to simplify compliance and make conducting investigations much more efficient.
Regularly update and patch systems: It’s vital that you ensure all software, operating systems, and applications are up to date with the latest security patches. Frequent updates aid in closing known vulnerabilities and lessening the risk of exploitation.
Incident response plan: It’s crucial as well that you create and frequently test an incident response plan. Guarantee that your team is well-prepared to react promptly and effectively to security incidents, reducing potential damage.
Log Management: Finally, it’s beneficial to implement a centralized log management platform to collect, store, and examine logs from multiple systems and applications. By monitoring your logs you can provide valuable insights into potential security incidents.
Security Monitoring: Use Cases
Cloud Security Monitoring
The vast majority of security monitoring solutions aid organizations in ensuring security in cloud environments, Logit.io’s solution provides this. For cloud environments our tool provides scalable capabilities, allowing you to promptly deploy the necessary production-ready stacks as required. Each stack is isolated and can be managed separately, supplying the flexibility to establish role-based teams and control access for specific users.
Log Management
Another example of a use case for security monitoring is to conduct log management simultaneously to collect, store, and examine logs from multiple systems and applications. Log management aids organisations in finding security incidents, monitoring user activities, and meeting compliance requirements. You can utilise Logit.io’s platform to manage your logs and conduct security monitoring, to guarantee the security of your IT infrastructure.
Malware Detection
Utilise a security monitoring solution to locate and mitigate the presence of malware, viruses, ransomware, or other malicious software within your organisation's IT environment. This can be conducted by monitoring endpoints, email attachments, and network traffic for indications of malicious code. By doing this, you can locate these concerns early, enabling you to act before significant damage occurs, such as the loss of data and sensitive information.
Network Traffic Analysis
Incorporating a security monitoring solution, like Logit.io’s, into your organisation will enable you to carry out network traffic analysis. With the tool, examine network traffic for irregular patterns, anomalies, or indications of malicious activity. This analysis can aid organisations in identifying and responding to threats like denial-of-service attacks or unusual data transfers. Also, network traffic analysis can be utilised in the event of a security incident. Your team can examine historical network traffic to comprehend the scope, timeline, and methods of an attack, helping in effective remediation.
Compliance Monitoring
Finally, adopting a security monitoring solution can assist your organisation in adhering to compliance requirements and regulations. Security monitoring supplies real-time insights into security events and activities, enabling organisations to quickly find and act on any deviations from compliance requirements. This proactive approach aids in ensuring ongoing adherence to regulations.
If you’ve enjoyed this article, why not read why firewalls are important for cybersecurity Or why log management is important for IT security.