Strong security measures are more important than ever in today’s dynamic digital world, where cyber dangers are always changing. Your company must safeguard itself against several threats, including hackers who could steal your data and framework or violate privacy laws. This is where continuous security monitoring comes in. To combat cyber attacks and other malicious agents, you must use continuous security monitoring tools to watch for threats to your systems and data.
Businesses now want real-time visibility into security misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and indicators of compromise in their networks and infrastructure. Conventional security measures like firewalls, antivirus programs, and penetration tests are no longer sufficient to fend against a highly skilled attacker. Assuming your infrastructure is stable, which is unlikely, attackers will still uncover new zero-day vulnerabilities to exploit. Owing to this, businesses are increasingly using continuous monitoring systems, which offer security information and can locate exposed data and compromised credentials on the dark web.
This blog will provide a comprehensive overview of continuous security monitoring — what it is, why it is important, how it works, and its benefits and best practices.
What is Continuous Security Monitoring?
Continuous security monitoring is a security solution that automates security monitoring across several security information sources. Solutions for continuous security monitoring offer real-time insight into an organization’s security posture and continuously scan for vulnerabilities, security misconfigurations, and cyber threats.
Since today’s organizations rely on technology and data to carry out critical business activities and transactions, continuous security monitoring is necessary. In addition, businesses now employ a higher proportion of remote workers and independent contractors, expanding their attack surface and creating more avenues for data theft. Even with strict processes, employees can still use devices and applications they are not authorized to use, thereby endangering data. Continuous security monitoring tools set you up to find weaknesses that might lead to a breach. The program is also expected to promptly notify you of this possible hazard so you can take appropriate action.
Now, let’s understand why continuous security monitoring is so important.
Why is Continuous Security Monitoring Important?
Most information security professionals concur that no organization’s security posture is complete without ongoing observation. As parts of your systems and external and internal software tools are upgraded and changed, new vulnerabilities may appear at anytime.
If there was no ongoing monitoring in place, these risks might go undiscovered. Thus, constant observation is essential to guarantee that your controls are as robust as feasible and that your data is secure. Furthermore, ongoing observation ensures that your company stays in conformity with the frameworks it has agreed to.
If a control deviates from compliance, a continuous monitoring tool will notify you so you can take appropriate action. This makes it easy for you to manage compliance and elevates security and compliance to a top priority for your organization year-round rather than during your audit.
Most organizations today, if not all of them, depend on technology to perform mission-critical tasks, making technology management and ensuring its availability, confidentiality, and integrity essential as well. To these requirements, four trends are making ongoing security monitoring more crucial:
- Digital Storage of Sensitive Data: Sensitive data is being increasingly digitally stored by organizations worldwide, whether it be employee-protected health information (PHI) or personally identifiable information (PII) of customers.
- Data Breach Notification Regulations: Governments are progressively mandating the reporting of data breaches in addition to these general data protection laws, which greatly amplifies the negative effects of security incidents on reputation.
- General Data Protection Legislation: Governments worldwide have implemented general data protection laws, such as California’s CCPA, New York’s Shield Act, and Brazil’s LGPD, in response to the European Union’s GDPR.
- Subcontracting and Outsourcing: Businesses commonly want to assign non-core functions to outside vendors, who may then assign those functions to other suppliers, significantly expanding their attack surface to third and fourth parties.
Next, we will discuss how continuous security monitoring works.
How Does Continuous Security Monitoring Work?
For continuous monitoring, there are several technologies available, and each has its variations and modalities. However, software that interfaces with your data system typically constitutes a continuous monitoring solution.
Continuous security monitoring programs periodically scan your system against its knowledge base to find vulnerabilities and indications of a possible breach and identify when control isn’t operating as it should. They gather information and summarize their conclusions so you may rectify any problems they find. Your continuous security monitoring software will determine how robust and efficient your continuous monitoring is.
Every organization has different requirements for monitoring depending on potential vulnerabilities, norms, and rules they must adhere to, as well as other factors. Depending on your organization’s demands, selecting the best continuous monitoring tool is critical. Here are the steps through which information security continuous monitoring works, per the white paper NIST SP 800-137 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology:
- Preserving situational awareness of all the systems in the company as well as its vendor network ecosystems
- Gathering, comparing, and evaluating data about security
- Continuing to be aware of risks, potential and current, and evaluating every security measure in place necessary to prevent them
- Combining risk management and information security frameworks for active risk management
- Delivering timely security status updates to all organizational levels and having organizational officials actively assess and mitigate risks
To do this, data must be gathered by your continuous monitoring program in line with pre-defined metrics that are uniform throughout your ecosystem, making use of information that is easily accessible due in part to the implementation of security measures and automated scanning. Every organizational unit should go through this process as often as necessary regularly. To improve asset visibility and risk awareness, your monitoring approach should be periodically examined for applicability and adjusted as necessary.
To make it more concise, a strong continuous security monitoring program helps organizations transition from compliance-driven risk management to data-driven risk management by giving them access to data that supports risk response decisions, security status information, and ongoing insights into the efficacy of security controls.
Thus, continuous security monitoring provides security professionals real-time visibility into their organization’s attack surface. What’s more, leading continuous security monitoring solutions provide businesses with full end-to-end visibility to spot security flaws or vulnerabilities and support them in adhering to legal requirements for information security compliance, all while providing analytics and reporting capabilities.
Continuous security monitoring has a few additional benefits, which we will discuss in the following section.
Benefits of Continuous Security Monitoring
The advantages of ongoing monitoring for your company are as follows:
- It gives you an overview of your present compliance situation and the actions required to keep it that way.
- Keeps track of data security metrics to enable you to maintain a high level of security
- It helps in stopping data breaches and mitigates risk for possible ones.
- Showcases your dedication to adherence to regulations by presenting reports and dashboards to clients, authorities, and other institutions
- Keeps track of system modifications and their effects on data security and compliance
- Simplifies upcoming audits because maintaining compliance is simple.
With these benefits, ongoing security monitoring is crucial to your compliance strategy. It helps you avoid a data breach’s potentially serious expenses and repercussions.
Last but not least, let’s find out what best practices you can follow to maximize the use of your continuous security monitoring tool.
Best Practices for Implementing Continuous Security Monitoring in Your Organization
Given the constantly evolving threat landscape, it is evident that businesses of all sizes need to monitor their security posture actively. Here are some best practices you can follow to make the most of your continuous security monitoring tool for your company:
Integrate Your Continuous Monitoring Program to Your Compliance Program
Systems for continuous monitoring are meant to alert you when vulnerabilities exist in your systems. While some tools may not provide you with the immediate information you need to ensure security compliance, most solutions can detect areas of non-compliance and notify you which measures need to be added by aligning with a wide range of security frameworks.
Cover all Your Digital Assets
You must ensure that your digital assets may be accessed and assessed by your continuous monitoring tools. This covers all linked devices, cloud infrastructure, code repositories, APIs, services, mobile and web apps, SSL certificates, etc.
Craft a Clear Action Protocol
It is critical to have a well-thought-out strategy for resolving any vulnerabilities your continuous monitoring technology highlights. You need a clear action protocol to identify who is responsible for the threat, make sure leadership is informed, and develop a fast action plan to fix the risk.
Augment Your Continuous Security Monitoring Tool with Your Own Knowledge
While software for continuous monitoring is a great tool, it cannot manage your security by itself. You and your team must address the identified risks and vulnerabilities with your expertise. Keeping your information security personnel educated and current on the most recent security developments is vital to handling emerging threats.
Continuous Security Monitoring with Akitra!
Establishing trust is a crucial competitive differentiator when courting new SaaS businesses in today’s era of data breaches and compromised privacy. Customers and partners want assurances that their organizations are doing everything possible to prevent disclosing sensitive data and putting them at risk, and compliance certification fills that need.
Akitra offers an industry-leading, AI-powered Compliance Automation platform for SaaS companies. Akitra, with its expertise in technology solutions and compliance, is well-positioned to assist companies in navigating the complexities of ISO 42001 compliance. As this standard focuses on the responsible use of AI, Akitra can provide invaluable guidance in implementing the necessary frameworks and processes.
Using automated evidence collection and continuous monitoring, together with a full suite of customizable policies and controls as a compliance foundation, our compliance automation platform and services help our customers become compliance-ready for NIST’s 800-218 Secure Software Development Framework and other security standards, such as SOC 1, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, ISO 9001, ISO 13485, NIST CSF, NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, FedRAMP, CCPA, CMMC, SOX ITGC, and more such as CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, Australian ISM and Essential Eight etc. In addition, companies can use Akitra’s Risk Management product for overall risk management using quantitative methodologies such as Factorial Analysis of Information Risks (FAIR) and qualitative methods, including NIST-based for your company, Vulnerability Assessment and Pen Testing services, Trust Center, and AI-based Automated Questionnaire Response product to streamline and expedite security questionnaire response processes, delivering huge cost savings. Our compliance and security experts also provide customized guidance to navigate the end-to-end compliance process confidently. Last but not least, we have also developed a resource hub called Akitra Academy which provides easy-to-learn short video courses on security, compliance, and related topics of immense significance for today’s fast-growing companies.
The benefits of our solution include enormous savings in time, human resources, and cost savings, including discounted audit fees with our audit firm partners. Customers can achieve compliance certification fast and cost-effectively, stay continuously compliant as they grow, and become certified under additional frameworks from our single compliance automation platform.
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