Continuous Monitoring

What is Continuous Monitoring in Cybersecurity?

Continuous Monitoring is a threat intelligence tool that gives an organization's digital environment real-time visibility and feedback. This security procedure uses automated scanning to speed up cleanup and secure your data from external threats.

Organizations today rely on technology and data to run their business operations. Many also use contract employees and cloud-based technology providers, and — thank you, COVID-19 — have legions of their employees working remotely.

Four trends that are increasing the importance of continuous security monitoring:

• The increasing digitization of sensitive data Whether it's customer personally identifiable information (PII) or employee protected health information (PHI), businesses throughout the world are rapidly digitizing sensitive data.
• General data protection laws Governments all around the world have enacted their own general data protection laws, such as Brazil's LGPD, New York's Shield Act, and California's CCPA, in response to the European Union's GDPR.
• Data breach notification laws Governments are increasingly requiring data breaches to be reported in addition to these general data protection laws, which significantly increases the reputational impact of security incidents.
• Outsourcing, on-sourcing, and subcontracting Non-essential portions of a company's operations are routinely outsourced to third-party suppliers, who may then subcontract to their own vendors, substantially increasing your attack surface and third-party and fourth-party risk.

How Does Continuous Security Monitoring Work?

Continuous monitoring systems function by delivering real-time data on a company's security posture. Information security continuous monitoring (ISCM), according to the white paper NIST SP 800-137 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, works by:

• Maintaining situational awareness of all systems across the organization and its vendor ecosystem
• Maintaining an understanding of threats and threat activities
• Assessing all security controls
• Collecting, correlating, and analyzing security-related information
• Providing actionable communication of security status across all tiers of the organization
• Active management of risk by organizational officials
• Integration of information security and risk management frameworks

This procedure should be followed on a regular basis, or as often as each organizational unit requires. In order to increase visibility into assets and awareness of potential dangers, your monitoring strategy should be assessed on a regular basis for relevance and altered as appropriate.

Benefits of Continuous Monitoring

Different approaches will uncover different subsets of the applicatio's security flaws, and we will be most effective at different stages of the development lifecycle.

• Better Network Visibility and Transparency By automatically collecting and analyzing data to reflect possible outages and critical trends, CM provides DevOps teams with information on the condition of the IT infrastructure.
• Facilitates Rapid Responses Implementing an alert system that instantly alerts the appropriate personnel the moment an IT event occurs is a key part of CM. This allows for quick response to security risks or functional stop-gaps, limiting harm and allowing for speedier system restoration to optimal levels of functioning.
• Minimizes System Downtime Consistent system monitoring and timely, appropriate warnings assist in maintaining system uptime by raising the alarm when a service outage or application performance issues occur.
• Assists with Healthy Business Performance Reduced system downtime also reduces the negative impact on customer experience, protecting the company from financial and credibility losses. Continuous Monitoring solutions may be used to track user reactions to software upgrades, which is beneficial to various departments, including development, QA, sales, marketing, and customer care.