The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) defines continuous monitoring as: "maintaining ongoing awareness of information security, vulnerabilities, and threats to support organizational risk management decisions."
Continuous monitoring gained popularity when organizations realized that the traditional manual checks on their IT infrastructure did not provide a complete picture of its health and vulnerabilities. This led to unidentified security threats and outdated information. Continuous monitoring, on the other hand, provides organizations with the ability to obtain real-time data and implement security procedures like incident response, threat assessment, computer and database forensics, and root cause analysis.
The goal of an organization implementing continuous monitoring is primarily to increase its network transparency and shed light on suspicious activity that could point to a breach in security, or an impending cyberattack through timely alert systems which initiate rapid incident responses.
This also provides authorized personnel with accurate and detailed data about infrastructure and application health in the organization's IT ecosystem, which enables them to identify and isolate issues before they cause unanticipated downtime and loss in revenue. They also use continuous monitoring to keep track of new application updates and their effects on infrastructure and user experience.
We can say that continuous monitoring enables organizations to boost their operational, business, and security functions by providing them with instantaneous feedback and comprehension about activities across their entire IT ecosystem.
There are predominantly three types of continuous monitoring used by organizations globally. They are:
This type of monitoring focuses on the collection of data from data centers, servers, hardware, storage, and software. The data collected is then analyzed to increase operational efficiency by detecting outages and performance degradations before time. This data is also used to pinpoint faults in infrastructure components and determine the origination of a problem in the infrastructure or system.
This type of continuous monitoring focuses on the network aspects of an IT ecosystem, such as firewalls, routers, virtual machines, switches, and servers. They are monitored for existing and potential issues to prevent network degradation and maintain the health of the network. All devices being monitored are assigned intervals and thresholds. High priority assets will have shorter monitoring intervals, while lesser priority assets are assigned longer intervals. Thresholds are limits assigned according to device and specification. The monitoring system sends out alerts if any of the assets cross any of the threshold parameters assigned to it. This helps keep all network assets healthy and in peak performance.
This type of monitoring captures data from deployed software using metrics, such as resource use, user experience, system response and uptime. These metrics help organizations identify problems in their applications, isolate them and diagnose them at the code level. This prevents users from experiencing critical performance and availability issues.
Every organization has an IT ecosystem that is not similar to another. This means the scope, threat landscape, and complexity will vary vastly across organizations. Even then, implementation of a CMS can be broken down to a set of simple, standardized steps which can be commonly applied across businesses. These include:
Any organization aiming to implement a continuous monitoring system should first understand and determine the scope of the implementation taking into consideration key factors, such as costs and potential benefits. This helps fit the initiative into the overall governance, risk, and compliance strategy of the organization and showcases the value that the system brings to the concerned stakeholders.
The organization should conduct a risk evaluation of its IT environment, taking into account and categorizing each asset based on risk. This helps establish stricter security controls when it comes to high risk assets and systems. This assessment also helps identify and set thresholds, useful intervals, and notification mechanisms.
The third step when it comes to implementing a CMS tool involves selection of the tool. This can be either a custom-made or an out-of-the-box solution, followed by establishing responsibilities and roles to whoever is involved, and designing the processes and regulations to be incorporated. This includes creating a time line for the project implementation and setting expectations for performance.
Every organization is different when it comes to its IT ecosystem. One size does not fit all when it comes to implementing a continuous monitoring system. The software tool should be configured for various features, like log aggregation, analytics, and customizable alerts based on information gathered during the risk assessment, which helps the organization monitor its ecosystem more effectively.
The performance of the CMS tool should be audited as soon as it is operational and demonstrates value. The initial readings and results of the system should be verified manually to ensure there were no faults in the implementation. Monitoring mechanisms and thresholds can be altered as needed to fine-tune the performance of the system.
Continuous monitoring stands out for some of the core benefits that it provides to the organizations that choose to implement it. These benefits provide the organization with immense value both in the short and long run. The following are the main benefits of continuous monitoring:
Continuous monitoring can provide great value to an organization in the long run by reducing compliance costs, providing stronger risk management and allowing for higher levels of proficiency when it comes to achieving business goals.
Once implemented, continuous monitoring can help your organization improve its financial and operational control, provide greater visibility into your organization's processes and generate greater transparency for investors, directors, and other relevant stakeholders.
Continuous monitoring should be on your road map if you wish to evolve your organization and establish new levels of automation and systematization when it comes to risk management.
