What is internal continuous monitoring?
Internal continuous monitoring is a strategy whereby businesses may more quickly and easily identify IT compliance issues and security risks within their organisation.
This differs from vendor-risk continuous monitoring which focuses on ongoing monitoring of third parties and suppliers.
For most modern organisations, the IT ecosystem is anything but static. Today's IT environments are always growing and changing, constantly increasing in complexity and capability. Unfortunately, as advancing IT systems continue to push the frontier in terms of business functionality, they are also pushing back against IT departments' capacity to mitigate evolving security threats. With new promises comes new risk, as well as new regulatory measures with which IT organisations must remain compliant. For many businesses, continuous monitoring is the solution.
As one of the essential parts of a risk management framework (RMF), internal continuous monitoring empowers organisations by allowing them to constantly review their IT security posture. Internal continuous monitoring helps determine whether the required, deployed and planned security controls continue to be effective when faced with inevitable changes to company information systems. When correctly applied, this approach is effective for securing new—as well as inherited—security controls and assessing the potential impact of planned and unplanned changes to the IT hardware, software and environment.
Given the complexity of most IT ecosystems, some companies may have concerns about how best to get started with continuous implementation. To help simplify the process and make it more accessible, continuous monitoring can be broken down into five individual steps:
Define the scope of the solution
It may be easy to say that all information systems fall under the banner of a specific continuous-monitoring deployment, but the reality is that there will likely be some grey areas in terms of what to include and what to exclude. With this in mind, the first step towards effective monitoring is clearly defining the scope and identifying the systems that will require continuous monitoring.
Perform risk assessments
Not all IT assets are created equal, and not all IT assets carry the same risks. As part of the continuous-monitoring deployment, IT organisations must individually assess every asset to determine the types and levels of security controls each will need. Higher-risk assets will naturally require stricter security, while some no- or low-risk assets may not require much security at all.
Select security controls
After performing the asset risk assessments mentioned above, the organisation must then act on this information, pairing each asset with the correct security controls tailored to individual risk levels. These controls can range from simple to advanced, and should provide a more-effective network security posture customised to each specific asset, as well as the system as a whole.
Configure software tools
With control applications firmly in place, the organisation can finally begin configuring their continuous-monitoring tool to collect relevant application data. Using log aggregation capabilities to capture log files from assets on the network, organisations create an ongoing, real-time record of everything that's happening on the network. This information can then be used to detect emergent threats, identify areas of non-compliance and measure performance against established metrics.
Establish ongoing assessment
Once the monitoring tool has been configured and deployed, the final step is for the organisation to simply continue monitoring and assessing their network. When functioning correctly, continuous monitoring will potentially produce millions of data points; to ensure that these points aren't overlooked, most businesses choose to incorporate big-data analytics, machine learning and other technologies. This helps guarantee that when abnormal network activity occurs, it doesn't slip past the security net.
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