Cloud Monitoring is a crucial part of the security stack for many modern enterprises. More businesses have continued to shift their services and operational activity into the cloud in the form of Software (SaaS), Platform (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). They have done this for several reasons, including:
- Accessibility in the age of hybrid and remote working
- Centralized data policies
- Business continuity
- On-demand self-service
- Ease of elasticity and scalability
- Efficiency.
This is taking place in both small- and large-scale enterprises. Threat actors have responded by targeting cloud services with increased frequency. Some of the cloud attack vectors include:
- Credentials stuffing or account hijacking
- Code injection to insecure APIs
- Exploiting insecure cloud, storage, container, or orchestration configuration
- System vulnerabilities, including infrastructure configuration issues
- Access to secrets due to insecure secrets storage
- Malicious insiders
- Resources abuse.
These attacks can lead to data breaches, theft and successful ransomware attacks, and disrupting operational resilience. It is more important than ever for cloud services users to gain visibility into the activity which is happening in their cloud infrastructure and respond quickly to threats. This, sadly, still remains an unrealized foundational step for many organizations and their cybersecurity programs.
Effective monitoring of these deployments to counter risks and address non-compliance issues becomes critical for organizations when implementing cloud solutions. Yet organizations may not always be able to afford the investment associated with a 24×7 on-premise monitoring capabilities or hiring threat experts with cloud expertise skills. So, what option does an organization have?
Moving Forward with an Outsourced Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Service
A Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service can provide real-time monitoring and analysis of event data from Cloud Platforms. Cloud security can be further enhanced with threat intelligence, threat detection and Incident Response capabilities. Cloud monitoring, when integrated with other MDR capabilities, can help enterprises significantly reduce the mean time to detect and respond to attacks against their cloud services implementations, preserving their operational resilience.
How We Can Help: The Obrela element in Cloud Monitoring
- Active Directory & Identity Management monitoring: Directory service is considered the most significant part of the security perimeter for every organization, including in the cloud. It is also the most targeted security service by threat actors. Obrela’s threat detection analytics collect Active Directory (sign in, audit) events to analyze authentication processes for applications, identify suspicious login attempts by location, brute force login attempts and escalation of privileges in correlation to cloud-native identity protection alerts, among other services.
- IaaS monitoring: Obrela collects security and telemetry events of virtual machines, storage, networking and other resources, monitoring for unauthorized access, malware activity, inadvertent and suspicious administrators’ actions and services availability. Monitored traffic on internal network zones and internet facing interfaces is enhanced with threat intelligence to identify external attackers at different stages of their kill chain process.
- PaaS monitoring: As enterprises use or develop cloud-native applications, Obrela’s Threat Analytics identify non-compliance or risks in addition to unauthorized access, insecure configurations, or malware activity. Cloud-native security alerts and vulnerability insights enhance threat intelligence with additional platform state information.
- Azure monitoring: Through integration with Obrela’s MDR Cloud, log sources in Azure on multiple layers including IaaS resources per tenant/subscription, Azure Active Directory, Identity Protection, Activity and Security Centre alerts, Cloud App Security alerts, Azure Advanced Threat Protection deployments, network interfaces, web application firewalls and more can be monitored.
- AWS monitoring: Through integration to Obrela’s MDR service, IaaS resources on Elastic Compute Service stack (EC2), EBS, Cloudwatch, CloudTrail, AWS Directory service, AWS GuardDuty, and other PaaS deployments on AWS can be monitored.
- Office365 monitoring: Office 365 is another big data silo through which Obrela’s Threat Analytics identify in real-time threats including unauthorized access, suspicious administrators’ actions, mass mail deletion, access to other mailbox accounts, changes in exchange policies, suspicious file transfers and more. Native security alerts, malware activity or other indicators enhance security intelligence with additional state information to prevent or detect early on data loss or leakage events.
- Custom Detection Analytics Rules: These rules are essential in Cloud Monitoring, providing user organizations with the flexibility to adapt security measures to the unique characteristics, risks, and compliance requirements of each customer. This, in turn, enhances the overall effectiveness of MDR services. Different organizations have unique business processes, compliance requirements, and risk profiles. Custom use cases enable us to align security measures with these specific considerations. Custom Use Cases can be designed to monitor and report on activities that are directly relevant to the regulatory environment.
Obrela’s Threat Detection Analytics enable advanced and in-depth analysis of large amounts of log data from multiple cloud log sources leveraging threat intelligence, expert rules and advanced security analytics algorithms to identify abnormal or suspicious behavior and patterns. Alert management capabilities enhance 24×7 monitoring to detect threats as soon as possible, triggering meaningful alerts and security response procedures, protecting enterprise assets and ensuring operational resilience.
Our clients are offered the advantage of fast integration to Obrela’s MDR service and day one visibility of security threats in their cloud environment. Clients can build customized processes and procedures for risk compliance and incident response plans, to further enhance Obrela’s capabilities for risk monitoring, identification, mitigation, response and recovery, to keep your business in business.
