As enterprises are accelerating the adoption of digital transformation, the attack surface is rapidly expanding into cloud and multi-cloud environments.  In order to effectively detect and respond to threats, the visibility that spans across on-premises and cloud infrastructure is a must. So, how can you increase visibility into cloud services and SaaS applications? Continue reading to gain insight on cloud security best practices.

Explore new solutions to gather data, including cloud proxy, data loss prevention, and open API integrations.

Traditional methods security leaders relied on for gathering information, such as firewalls, are no longer effective in a remote work model.  It’s important to look at different solutions that will provide adequate visibility into your cloud and SaaS applications.  However, you must be strategic when choosing solutions, as you can easily end up with too many products and spend too much time trying to gather the data across them. To determine what new security controls will help you get the visibility you need, start by assessing where your critical data resides and working backward from there.

A few options to consider are cloud-based proxies, which are essentially firewalls in the cloud; Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs), for data loss prevention; and products that have open API access, so you can get granular with the data you see. Additionally, user awareness training is a critical part of your cloud security strategy to protect data for your remote workforce. Educate your team on the security risks and best practices when using cloud and SaaS applications – and focus on the user benefits of SaaS platforms like SharePoint and Office 365.

Focus your cloud security monitoring efforts on alerts that provide insight into user activity.

Cloud activity logs from providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are essential since they generate actionable alerts that allow you to see user logins and activity in the cloud environment. One benefit of using cloud providers is the granularity of their access control logs. For example, AWS CloudTrail surfaces not only user access but user commands after authentication. One drawback of using these built-in logs is the substantial lift of building custom content around them due to their granularity and complexity; however, if your content team is up to the task, cloud provider log sources provide unparalleled granularity from a single source.

To give an example, AWS CloudTrail logs can offer the username, what role was assumed, what exact commands were attempted from what IP address, and against which specific resources. They even provide granularity down to whether or not the user used multi-factor authentication when running the command. In this way, not only do cloud activity events provide insights to keep your organization secure, but they also increase visibility between departments, therefore aiding in business continuity.

Prioritize ways to integrate your technologies – including SIEM, EDR, Cloud, and SaaS applications.

As more businesses shift to cloud and SaaS applications, it’s essential that these integrate into your SIEM and EDR to provide a centralized view of your entire environment – it only takes one unintegrated tool to create major inefficiencies in your business. For example, if a health monitoring tool cannot ingest one of your log sources, then visibility and alerting must live in separate places, decreasing the likelihood of proper configuration and maintenance. Similarly, log sources that are not optimized through a SIEM will decrease security posture.

When looking at new tool purchases, prioritize integrations to reduce the number of technology pivots needed to complete investigations, thereby accelerating threat detection and response and improving threat hunts.

ReliaQuest’s customers are increasing visibility through GreyMatter, the first SaaS security platform. This delivers protection by integrating data security across SIEM, EDR, multi-cloud and hybrid environments—regardless of vendor or data location. ReliaQuest GreyMatter improves speed detection and response, and leverage validated content and benchmarking to continuously improve the effectiveness of all their security investments.

Is your organization Migrating to the Cloud? Check out our quick 10-minute webinar for your must-have security needs.

For more information on how ReliaQuest can help, visit: Maximizing Existing Security Investments