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Is Your Security Dashboard Ready for the Cloud?

The ability to feed key security information onto a big screen dashboard opens up many new opportunities for managing the day-to-day security and maintenance workload as well as providing a useful method of highlighting new incidents faster than “just another email alert.”

Most Security Operation Centres I’ve visited in recent years have embraced having a few dedicated big-screen displays, but most are restricted to monitoring the on-premise architecture such as local firewalls and servers rather than taking a more holistic approach and accounting for the increasing use of cloud hosted infrastructure and services.

Security no longer starts and ends at the “front door,” with cloud playing a bigger role in more and more organisations. Here’s four things I think every company that uses cloud infrastructure should consider surfacing on their security dashboards.

Inventory and Discovery

The traditional model of server provisioning started changing with the growth of virtualisation. No longer can you assume that new hardware would be purchased and entered into a CMDB.

With the growth of cloud infrastructure, the provisioning of new virtual infrastructure became even easier, but with that comes new challenges for your security processes. For that reason, making sure that newly detected devices are highlighted front and center on a dashboard makes a lot of sense and can help to understand the changes going on during provisioning of a new or updated application during the DevOps cycle. Ensuring security coverage against these new devices is key to making sure that gaps don’t develop over time.

Vulnerabilities and Priorities

When vulnerabilities are detected, it’s important that they are presented in a practical fashion. Simply listing every missing patch or misconfiguration often isn’t a sensible approach to managing your workload. A good dashboard should help reveal the most common and highest risk vulnerabilities in an easy-to-read (Read more...)