Agencies don’t always implement their continuous monitoring plans because that would require a new philosophy toward cloud security, according to Dave Hinchman, director of IT and cyber at the Government Accountability Office. GAO is making 35 recommendations to four agencies to fully implement key cloud security practices. Agriculture, Labor, and Treasury neither agreed nor disagreed with the recommendations. DHS, Labor, and Treasury described actions taken or planned to address the recommendations. We made 35 recommendations to the agencies to fully implement key cloud security practices.
To do this, you’ll need to know your IT environment well and understand the practical needs and cost limits. Consulting closely with all relevant teams’ stakeholders will help you understand their needs and expectations. The goal is to eliminate any possibility of a critical yet unmonitored system going offline. But there should also be no surprises when an unexpected tech bill reaches the accounting team. If you’ve ever gone through a SOC 2 audit, for example, you’re probably familiar with the scramble to document and prepare. When following FedRAMP ConMon, meticulous record-keeping and documentation throughout the year make the reauthorization process much more straightforward — and the assessors are assuming that too.
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Continuous monitoring solutions can help IT operations teams determine whether the update had a positive or negative effect on user behavior and the overall customer experience. Continuous monitoring can also play a role in monitoring the operational performance of applications. A continuous monitoring software tool can help IT operations analysts detect application performance issues, identify their cause and implement a solution before the issue leads to unplanned application downtime and lost revenue. FedRAMP provides a standardized approach to security assessments, authorization and continuous monitoring of cloud products and services.
The sooner you spot errors, the earlier you can begin the root cause analysis and the subsequent remediation process. In general, the world is moving toward continuous monitoring as the standard. Continuous compliance can sound like a heavy lift to maintain, especially knowing that security and compliance teams are already overworked and bogged down in security questionnaires, audit documentation requests, and other manual compliance operations processes.
Frequency of security control assessments to maintain continuous compliance
Blumira’s detection and response platform enables faster resolution of threats to help you stop ransomware attacks and prevent data breaches. Blumira’s team strives to continuously help your organization improve your overall security coverage, providing ongoing expertise as your trusted security advisor. Although continuous monitoring may not sound very innovative – monitoring has always been continuous, in one sense of the word – it actually encourages a fundamentally new approach to collecting and analyzing data. It helps teams not only to maximize visibility, but also to respond to issues as proactively as possible. Fuse data from across your attack surface to eliminate blind spots, empower practitioners, and reduce risk.
Cloud security monitoring solutions often rely on automation to measure and assess behaviors related to data, applications and infrastructure. Performing ongoing security assessments determines whether the set of deployed security controls in a cloud information system remains effective in light of new exploits and attacks, and planned and unplanned changes that occur in the system and continuous monitoring cloud its environment over time. To maintain an authorization that meets the FedRAMP requirements, cloud.gov must monitor their security controls, assess them on a regular basis, and demonstrate that the security posture of their service offering is continuously acceptable. This report evaluates the extent to which selected agencies have effectively implemented key cloud security practices.
Continuously monitor network traffic and resources
The CSP must have an incident response plan to respond promptly and effectively to security incidents. When the CSP identifies a threat or vulnerability, it must take corrective action to mitigate the risk. CI/CD automates the building, testing, and deployment stages into a streamlined, error-resistant pipeline. This means faster releases, bug fixes, and more time to focus on feature development.
Other types of monitoring — such as infrastructure and application monitoring — can also be continuous if they focus on immediate, ongoing detection of problems. For example, the agencies partially implemented the practice regarding continuous monitoring for some or all of the systems. Although the agencies developed a plan for continuous monitoring, they did not always implement their plans.
- Moving to the cloud inherently lowers an organization’s visibility across their infrastructure, so cloud monitoring security tools should bring a single pane of glass to monitor application, user and file behavior to identify potential attacks.
- The cloud.gov team achieves its continuous monitoring strategy primarily by implementing and maintaining a suite of automated components, with some manual tasks to assist with documenting and reporting to people outside the core team.
- Service-level objectives measure user experience and improve collaboration with developers.
- FedRAMP post-authorization conducts continuous monitoring, re-authorizations, and audits of authorized cloud products and services to ensure that Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) remain in compliance with authorizations and address emerging and evolving security threats.
Until these agencies fully implement the cloud security key practices identified in federal policies and guidance, the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of agency information contained in these cloud systems is at increased risk. Any good continuous security monitoring solution will start with the discovery of all digital assets that contain or process sensitive data, regardless of whether they are managed by your organization or a third-party. Continuous security monitoring is essential today because organizations depend on technology and data to complete key business processes and transactions.
For reference, the attack surface is the total number of attack vectors that could be used to launch a successful cyberattack to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data or cause data loss. Setting up layers of security can help organizations to achieve the most visibility into their tech stack. Native cloud monitoring tools such as AWS GuardDuty can help with that, but it’s important to bring in specialized tools to address different components of the tech stack, from physical hardware to orchestration. Likewise, whereas traditional application and infrastructure monitoring might involve collecting and analyzing metrics at fixed intervals – such as once a minute – continuous monitoring would mean collecting and analyzing data in true real time. Almost all monitoring operations typically aim to be relatively continuous, in the sense that they collect and interpret data on an ongoing basis.