Continuous monitoring (CM) is about using automated tools to constantly check an organization’s networks, IT systems, and security infrastructure to detect in real time any security threats, performance issues, or non-compliance problems.
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CM, sometimes referred to as ConMon, combines software and hardware tools to automate the real-time collection, analysis, and reporting of data about an organization’s network, applications, and infrastructure. This data delivers a comprehensive picture of IT environment performance and vulnerabilities.
Continuous monitoring is a vital element of a robust cybersecurity platform, enabling security operations (SecOps) to:
- See the overall health of IT infrastructure including networks and applications deployed in the cloud
- Identify potential security vulnerabilities
- Detect cyber threats in real time and address them quickly
- Mitigate risks
- Protect confidential data
- Develop greater security resilience
Understanding continuous monitoring
The growth in frequency and complexity of cyber threats coupled with the use of distributed systems and always-on digital services makes it imperative for organizations to be able to constantly see the security status of their data, applications, and infrastructure. Periodic or batch monitoring—where scheduled checks are performed at set intervals—can leave issues undetected between checks and the organization vulnerable. Hence the need for more proactive security.
CM works by automating key security functions. It provides:
- Automated data collection: from multiple sources, for example system logs, network traffic, and applications.
- Automated analysis: pinpointing patterns, anomalies, and potential security threats.
- Automated reporting: presenting a clear picture of the system’s health, performance, and security posture.
- Automated response: alerting to suspicious activity in real- or near-time and/or taking predefined action.
Types of continuous monitoring
There are three core components to continuous monitoring:
- Network monitoring. This includes inspecting network traffic patterns, inbound and outbound traffic email and web traffic, bandwidth utilization, latency, packet loss, network device health (routers, switches, firewalls), and protocol-level issues. The objective is to see if data is moving properly and safely on the network.
- Application monitoring. This is about tracking the performance of software applications by gathering data such as response times, system uptime, resource utility, availability, and error rates.
- System monitoring. The focus here is on IT infrastructure like servers, storage, hardware units, physical devices, and computing resources.
While these are generally accepted as being the three components necessary for continuous monitoring, it’s worth noting that many organizations also include compliance monitoring. This is the practice of ensuring the organization is meeting compliance requirements by checking systems, processes, and data handling against regulatory requirements, industry standards, and internal policies.
Several tools and technologies are employed within continuous monitoring such as vulnerability scanners, security information and event management (SIEM) systems, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) to name a few. Two of the most important to note are:
- Log management and aggregation. Log data is the main source of information allowing IT to pick up on potential cybersecurity threats. Therefore, it is crucial to collect it from various sources, including user activity, application use, and system performance. This data then needs to be collected, centralized, and consolidated (aggregated) from various log files across distributed systems into one location. Historical system logs are useful for creating performance, security, and user behavior benchmarks, which make it easier for IT to recognize anomalies like brute force attacks, password spraying, SQL injection, or data exfiltration.
- Passive monitoring. This is observing and capturing data from existing system activities without adding test traffic or synthetic transactions. In other words, passive monitoring is about "listening" to real user traffic, application logs, network packets, and system events.
Benefits of continuous monitoring
One of the biggest advantages to CM is its ability to improve the organization’s security posture, but the benefits don’t stop there. Others include:
- Increased visibility and transparency. Having a comprehensive real-time view of the whole IT landscape puts the organization in a stronger position to see and respond to security issues before they cause extensive damage.
- Enhanced threat detection and incident response. Speed is key in cybersecurity. The faster an organization can deal with a threat, the less damage it causes. Continuous monitoring makes it possible to assess threats quickly based on severity and take appropriate action, sometimes before they cause disruption. In many cases automated alerts are sent to the appropriate IT teams so they can immediately address urgent issues. This minimizes downtime, decreases mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR), and enables systems and applications to be restored quickly. The data collected through CM enables the business to make informed decisions about their cybersecurity strategy and enhance their resilience, reducing the chance of issues in the future.
- Improved compliance. For businesses that need to comply with regulations like HIPPA, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), or the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), continuous monitoring is often required as a means of ensuring data protection and privacy. Once again, the enhanced visibility and real-time data provided by CM enables organizations to spot vulnerabilities and take appropriate action before a breach occurs.
- Increased operational efficiency and risk management. Risk monitoring helps a business to manage security risk more efficiently, reducing downtime and service disruption and bringing costs down. Continuous monitoring also provides data that can be used to understand and optimize an organization’s business and operational performance. For example, tracking user behavior makes it possible to optimize the customer experience, thereby improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Detecting application performance issues, on the other hand, means disruptions can be resolved before the issue leads to unplanned downtime and lost revenue.
Implementing continuous monitoring
When it comes to successfully implementing continuous monitoring, there are certain steps an organization should take:
- Clarifying objectives and scope. It’s important to be discriminating when it comes to choosing which systems and data to monitor—it would be expensive and unwieldy to monitor everything all the time. Each business has different needs and objectives. Stakeholders should be consulted to ensure the monitoring profile aligns with organizational, technical, and budgetary limitations. A risk assessment is a good idea at this point, prioritizing assets depending on risk and potential impact of a cyberattack. Higher-risk assets require more rigorous security controls, whereas low-risk assets may require none at all.
- Technology selection. There is a wealth of different solutions that enable continuous monitoring. Organizations should take into account how scalable, flexible, and cost-effective each technology is.
- Monitoring policies and procedures. Security controls help protect physical property and computer systems from security risks and include passwords and other forms of authentication, firewalls, antivirus software, intrusion detection systems (IDS) and encryption measures. Organizations need to clarify who is in charge of monitoring, assign owners for each control, create data collection standards, set rules and thresholds for alerts and reports, plan how to manage incidents, and define escalation procedures.
- Configuration and integration. The technology selected should be compatible with the rest of the IT infrastructure, including software applications and the SIEM system. Then it will need to be customized and configured so that all systems work well together.
- Review. As suggested by the term, continuous monitoring is not a “set and forget” activity. Ongoing analysis is crucial to determine whether the organization’s cybersecurity objectives are being met. In particular, the CM strategy will have to adapt to changing needs or infrastructure and new cyber threats or potential risks.
Challenges of continuous monitoring
While the benefits of continuous monitoring are significant, it is not without its difficulties. Most notably, it requires significant investment of money, time, technology, and staff. On a technical level, challenges might include:
- Data overload and alert fatigue. CM produces a huge amount of data, increasing storage needs and workload. Hence why it’s important to specify high-priority data and systems when setting up continuous monitoring.
- Alert fatigue. IT can easily become overwhelmed by the number of warnings, some of which could be false positives or low-risk issues. This is where automation tools like runbooks can be integrated with alerts to resolve issues without the need for human intervention.
- Tracking endpoint activity. These days, a variety of devices are in use by employees, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets, printers, and smartphones. This means it’s essential to use a combination of different continuous monitoring methods to gain full visibility.
- Ensuring privacy and data protection. Since there is so much data to track, it’s important to prioritize, assigning assets as low, medium, or high in importance so that resources are used effectively.
- Integration. Compatibility issues are possible considering the different systems, applications, data sources, and tools involved in CM. This presents a new challenge every time there are significant changes to the organization or its infrastructure. It’s why frequent consultation with all stakeholders is so important, to ascertain whether the monitoring is benefitting or disrupting them.
Future trends in continuous monitoring
As cyber threats and cybersecurity continue to evolve, so will continuous monitoring. One trend to note is the impact of AI and machine learning (ML) on monitoring. With its ability to inspect large amounts of data, spot patterns, and catch irregularities that humans would find difficult to detect, it is helping businesses improve detection and response. This will introduce even greater autonomous decision-making, allowing AI to take proactive defensive action and respond to attacks in real time.
Where can I get help with continuous monitoring?
Trend Vision One™ is the only enterprise cybersecurity platform that centralizes cyber risk exposure management, security operations, and robust layered protection to help you predict and prevent threats, accelerating proactive security outcomes. Powered by AI and informed by leading-edge research and the latest threat intelligence, Trend Vision One™ Security Operations (SecOps) provides critical insights into customer’s infrastructure, allowing organizations like yours to take control of cybersecurity risks with a single platform — and stop adversaries faster.
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