The Critical Building Blocks of Cloud Visibility
The ability to see all activity within your cloud network is called Cloud Visibility. This visibility gives CISOs more control over their cloud infrastructure and allows them to monitor cloud security, performance issues, and costs.
This kind of monitoring can be performed by utilizing various tools. Some tools are geared toward a single purpose, and others, like ermetic.com, have a comprehensive suite of tools utilized by CISOs to map their cloud attack surface, improving visibility through automated monitoring.
Building Blocks of Cloud Visibility
Cloud visibility includes monitoring and analyzing various aspects of a cloud environment.
Resource Usage Monitoring and Analysis
Cloud resource usage monitoring and analysis involves tracking and analyzing the utilization of resources in a cloud environment, such as CPU, memory, storage, and network bandwidth.
Network Traffic Monitoring and Analysis
Cloud traffic monitoring and analysis involves tracking and analyzing network traffic flow in a cloud environment. This can include monitoring ingress and egress traffic, identifying traffic patterns, and identifying potential security threats.
Security Event Monitoring and Analysis
Cloud security event monitoring and analysis involves continuously monitoring and analyzing various events and activities within a cloud environment to detect and respond to security threats.
Application Performance Monitoring and Analysis
Cloud application performance monitoring and analysis involves continuously monitoring and analyzing the performance of applications running on a cloud environment to ensure they meet desired performance levels and to identify and resolve any issues that may arise.
Mechanisms Utilized to Facilitate Cloud Visibility
Cloud Vendor Provided Tools
Providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer monitoring and analysis tools that provide detailed metrics, charts, and alerts that are compatible with other tools for additional visibility. These tools can often perform network analysis too.
Third-party Tools
Several third-party network monitoring tools can also monitor and analyze network traffic across multiple cloud providers. These tools often provide more advanced features such as historical data, trend analysis, and custom dashboards.
Log analysis
They collect and analyze log information from disparate sources, such as servers, applications, and network devices, to identify patterns and outliers that may suggest a security risk. These identified trends, user behavior, and other information are helpful in cloud optimization.
Cloud security tools
Network traffic monitoring and analysis results are generated by cloud security tools such as firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems, and SIEM systems to identify and respond to potential security threats. Additionally, cloud access security brokers provide an additional layer of security by monitoring and controlling access to cloud services and identifying and responding to potential threats.
By using these methods and mechanisms, organizations can better understand how resources are utilized in their cloud environment and make informed decisions about resource allocation, scaling, and cost optimization. Organizations can better understand network traffic flows in their cloud environment and identify improvements and vulnerabilities.
Benefits of Cloud Visibility
Cloud visibility for CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) can provide several benefits, including:
Improved security
CISOs can gain better visibility into their organization’s cloud infrastructure, which can help them identify and address potential security threats more effectively.
Compliance
Cloud visibility can help CISOs ensure that their organization’s cloud infrastructure complies with relevant regulations and industry standards.
Cost savings
By gaining visibility into their organization’s cloud infrastructure, CISOs can identify and eliminate unnecessary cloud resources, resulting in cost savings.
Better decision-making
With better visibility into their organization’s cloud infrastructure, CISOs can make more informed decisions about their cloud strategy and investments.
Improved incident response
With better visibility into the cloud infrastructure, CISOs can respond to security incidents more effectively and quickly.
Better governance
Cloud visibility can help CISOs establish better governance and oversight over the organization’s cloud infrastructure, which can help them ensure that the infrastructure is being used securely and promptly.
In Conclusion
Cloud visibility is essential for ensuring cloud-based services’ security, compliance, performance, cost optimization, and governance. With adequate visibility, organizations may be able to leverage the benefits of the cloud fully and may be exposed to risks and inefficiencies.
It also includes the ability to view and manage cloud resources and to identify and troubleshoot issues. Additionally, cloud visibility should provide insight into the cost of cloud resources and the ability to optimize resource usage to reduce costs.
