Assess and monitor your infrastructure with a Zero Trust framework
Assessing infrastructure, also referred to as infrastructure monitoring, is a process that enables you to evaluate, manage, and analyze the capacity and performance of your IT infrastructure—such as servers, applications, virtual machines, databases, containers, and other backend IT components. Organizations implement configuration management to define settings and configurations for all software and hardware. The core objective of configuration management is to enable organizations to plan, monitor, control, and determine requirements and configurations for their infrastructure.
Monitoring your infrastructure
Successful infrastructure monitoring requires organizations to have clearly defined parameters for what is being measured and monitored—and how. Implementing best practices and using the right tools available for effective infrastructure monitoring helps organizations save costs and time. To optimize your security operations and have clear visibility, you can implement the following technologies that offer real-time monitoring and analysis.
Security Information Event Management
Security Information Event Management (SIEM) is a combination of Security Information Management (SIM) and Security Event Management (SEM). SIEM solutions enhance security awareness by identifying threats and vulnerabilities based on user behavior anomalies. SIEM software tracks, logs, and collects data from various security devices for compliance and auditing purposes. It alerts organizations about potential threats, security breaches, or regulatory and compliance issues.
Security Orchestration, Automation and Response
Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) combines threat and vulnerability management (orchestration), security operations automation, and security incident response into one single platform. SOAR technology orchestrates and automates the manual tasks of threat investigation and response.
- Security orchestration coordinates and integrates various security and productivity tools, such as vulnerability scanners, firewalls, user behavior statistics, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and SIEM platforms.
- Security automation analyzes the data collected from security orchestration and automates the standard workflows and tasks, such as vulnerability scanning, log analysis, and auditing. It triggers security alerts and potential intrusions.
- Security response works with both automated and manual processes to plan, manage, monitor, and report incidents to support a timely response to security threats.
Both SOAR and SIEM platforms collect, monitor, and analyze data from multiple sources. However, there are a few differences as to how each platform performs and executes the security processes. For example, SIEM systems collect data, determine anomalies, evaluate threats, and send alerts to security analysts when there's a potential threat. SOAR systems integrate a wider range of internal and external tools and applications while handling the same tasks. SOAR technology uses artificial intelligence to automate threat detection and incident response. This enables the sending of an alert about a security incident before it occurs. Both platforms can be used together for overall security operations.
Endpoint Detection and Response
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is a technology that monitors for and detects potential threats or suspicious activities occurring at endpoints. The core objective of EDR solutions is to provide real-time alerts and visibility into threats and the impact on the organization, if there is an attack.
Workload behavior assessment
The Zero Trust approach ensures proactive security against threats for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid workloads.
Automatically flag suspicious behavior
Examples of suspicious behavior can be an unusual sign-in time or location of a user, or an unusual way of using an application or piece of software. Organizations deploy threat intelligence and response solutions, aligned with Zero Trust strategy, to defend against attackers. Threat intelligence and response tools flag any suspicious behavior or activities that occur on your resources. This is done by generating alerts when a security incident or compliance issue is detected.
Automatically block risky behavior
With trends like bring your own device (BYOD) and remote workforce, changes in user behavior are natural and bound to happen. The Zero Trust principle of never trust, always verify, encourages organizations to implement risk management strategies, which include identifying and assessing human behavior. Enforcing secure configurations and enabling deny or block options can alleviate the threat of major security incidents.