A security analyst’s hunting capabilities are only as strong as the intelligence they have available. Yet when protecting cloud environments, security teams struggle to make sense of mass amounts of event data coming from various log sources, says Andrew Hollister, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), at the cyber product company LogRhythm, pictured.
As of 2022, over 60 percent of all corporate data is stored in the cloud according to Statista. At the same time, (ISC)2 revealed that the cybersecurity skills gap has grown more than twice as much as the cyber workforce has over the past year. With limited resources available and more data to protect, analysts need every tool in their arsenal to alleviate the time it takes to investigate and respond to an ever-evolving threat landscape. It is imperative that organizations are addressing changing security needs to safely protect the future of their environment. They need a scalable cloud-native solution that can support over-burdened security teams.
Security burden
Cloud technology is here to stay. As each organization’s data sources expand, their security measures must scale at the same pace. Without the right platform in place, sensitive data will remain at risk of compromise. The following factors are making it harder for analysts to secure the cloud environment:
•Endless Data Sources. The digital landscape is constantly expanding. An abundance of moving parts is generating an explosion of metrics and logs, even a mid-sized cloud application can generate hundreds of millions of logs a day.
•The Ever-Growing Skills Gap. The skills gap in the security field is no secret. Chief In-formation Security Officers (CISOs) and Security Operations Center (SOC) managers who can reduce or close their critical skills gaps have the highest probability of minimising business impact from cyberattacks when budgets and staffing are constrained.
•Lack of Visibility. In 2022, organizations worldwide were using an average amount of 130 software as a service (SaaS) applications. While the SaaS vendor is responsible for securing the application, the organization is responsible for securing their data. Without the right insights, security teams are left in the dark when it comes to the threats within their cloud environments. Attackers are taking advantage of open-source software to un-cover vulnerabilities, upload malware, and corrupt code libraries with shell commands.
•More Sophisticated Attacks. Threat actors are constantly deploying new tactics to avoid detection. This leaves analysts in a position where they are having to react to more advanced attacks with the same number of resources as before.
Limitless data
As modern threats increase in both frequency and sophistication, organizations cannot afford to take a backseat when it comes to uncovering threats. Overburdened security teams can over-come threat hunting and investigation hurdles with powerful cloud-native security analytics.
An all-in-one cloud-native security operations platform enables analysts to benefit from a simplified and productive user experience. By deploying a 100 per cent cloud-native SaaS platform, teams can focus on threat hunting as opposed to managing the implementation process.
Cloud-native security operations platform allows analysts to automatically see and easily investigate pieces of activity in one simple workflow, streamlining the threat detection process. The right solution facilitates fast decision making with suggestive searches to support analyst’s threat hunting activities. Security teams gain a flexible security approach to save dashboards and searches and schedule specific reports daily, monthly, and/or quarterly.
At the same time, security teams can decrease threat investigation and detection time with automated surfacing of critical threats from logs and log analytics observations. By intelligently combining this data into grouped clusters across users, hosts, and networks, analysts can surface the most pertinent observations that need attention and easily find related observations in one simple workflow.
Security operations platforms are about more than collecting and storing logs. They help security teams understand what their data means. Easy guided workflows help build new policies to en-sure future data can be easily searched and automatically fed into visualizations. Identification rules can be harnessed to create policies for parsing similar logs while normalization rules map data fields within dashboards, search, and reports. Analytics rule builder helps organizations build their own threat detections or organizations can leverage quality out-of-the box content that will surface critical threats for investigation.
With a cloud-native platform at hand, even novice security analysts can gain complete visibility into their environment. Harnessing an intuitive interface combined with powerful analytics tools and a seamless analyst workflow provides a powerful security operations platform for threat investigation, hunting, and reporting on critical threats with ease.
A Cloud-Native Future
Cloud security is essential for modern cybersecurity. Contextual analytics into cybersecurity threats can reduce the noise, enabling organizations to quickly secure their environment even when operating with a small security team. Analysts need an intuitive experience to streamline their threat hunting activities. With the right cloud-native security operations platform in place, overburdened security teams gain intuitive capabilities to successfully protect their organization’s reputation, safeguard sensitive client in-formation, and deliver products and services without disruption.
