Monitoring Critical Cloud Workloads

As more organizations move critical workloads to cloud environments, they need the ability to adapt their security practices to protect changing architectures and defend against advanced threats. A new report from InformationWeek provides a phased approach to strengthening cloud security. Topics include stopping waste by underusing and overspending on cloud assets, the next "new normal" in cloud security software, and the cloud coming of age amid unprecedented change. Each entry is filled with valuable information, but the focus of this post will be teeing up the tips featured in the report's lead section, Monitoring Critical Cloud Workloads.

If you're ready to dive right in, download the report now. Or, keep reading to learn more about how to evolve security practices for the changing cloud landscape, deal with risks from blind spots and unmanaged assets, and take a phased approach to cloud security. Below are some of the highlights, but the report dives deeper into each phase and recommendation.

Phase 1: Creating a Critical Cloud Workload Monitoring Baseline

To truly understand if workloads are threatened or under attack, you need to understand their normal behaviors. The report offers several steps you can take, including:

• Identify sensitive and regulated data
• Understand who has access, privileges, and rights to workloads
• Create an always-up-to-date inventory of workloads

Phase 2: Protect Your Critical Cloud Workloads

After you've established a baseline, the next step is to add services, tools, and best practices to applications and workloads according to their respective levels of risk. Recommendations include:

• Apply protection policies to critical workloads and data
• Encrypt data and holding the keys to your kingdom
• Limit how data is shared

Phase 3: Responding to Critical Cloud Workload Issues

Whenever there's suspicious access to cloud workloads, those incidents could require a review or response. Below are options you could take:

• Require additional verification like two-factor authentication for high-risk workloads
• Adjust access as new data and services are delivered
• Find and remove malicious content like malware

For an in-depth breakdown of each phase, download the report now.

Monitoring and Defending Cloud Workloads with Reveal(x) 360

No matter how strong your defenses are, the reality is that we're living in a post-compromise world. With continuous out-of-band monitoring and cloud-scale machine learning, Reveal(x) 360 establishes behavioral baselines and detects changes that indicate potential attacks in real time. Packet-level insight provides security teams with the context they need to respond to advanced threats in cloud environments with confidence.

To try Reveal(x) 360 for yourself, start the demo to see how our cloud-native network detection and response (NDR) product works in a real cloud environment.