Security in the Digital Age: How IT Infrastructure Monitoring Reduces Cyber Threats
2024-07-02 13:42:41The need for digital transformation couldn't be more evident. The pandemic and ongoing market fluctuations have challenged every organisation type, from small startups to corporations handling multinational supply chain management and retail operations.
The rate at which companies adopt technologies to overcome hurdles and innovate best shows in the global digital transformation expenditure. Starting at $1.85 trillion in 2022, Statista predicts its value will go up nearly twofold by 2026.
But just as the digital gold rush is in full swing, so is the world of cyber threats. If it were measured as a country, cybercrime would be the world's third-largest economy after the US and China. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, only in 2024 will digital attacks incur damages totalling $9.5 trillion worldwide.
With escalating threats and technical complexities, it's a no-brainer that companies must invest in system observability, especially IT infrastructure monitoring.
These two concepts sometimes get confused, so let's begin defining them before diving into details on how IT infrastructure monitoring enhances your security. By the end of my article, you'll better understand monitoring systems: their work, benefits, challenges, and why they need automation and orchestration. Stick around!
Observability vs. IT infrastructure monitoring
Both observability and monitoring provide insights into your system’s health and performance. They involve collecting, analysing, and visualising data to enable identifying and solving issues to ensure system reliability, efficient performance, and optimal resource utilisation.
Observability is a key aspect of a system’s functionality. The more observable your system is, the easier it is to understand how it works. By analysing the data it generates—logs, metrics, and traces—you can see what’s happening across your hybrid environments.
In contrast, monitoring involves tracking and analysing the condition of infrastructure components against predefined metrics to ensure the system’s optimal performance, security, and availability.
IT infrastructure monitoring includes hardware – like servers or network devices, and software – applications and operating systems, as well as network services and processes.
By monitoring all system components, you can detect and fix technical issues before they become failures, optimise performance, and minimise cybersecurity threats. As I already said, these are rife in the digital age.
IT infrastructure monitoring enhances your security posture
Early threat identification enables a rapid response and limits the potential escalation of the risk.
Advanced IT infrastructure monitoring is crucial in detecting anomalies in the network and devices that may indicate attempts of cyber attacks.
To do so, monitoring systems use technologies such as:
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions collect and aggregate logs from various sources in the organisation. They allow you to analyse them in real time to detect abnormal patterns and threats and provide a complete overview of your enterprise security.
Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are essential for monitoring network traffic to detect and prevent unauthorised access and attacks. IDS focuses on detecting and reporting potential attacks, while IPS can take action to stop these attacks in real time.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) enhances detection and response capabilities beyond the network, including endpoint devices, cloud applications, and other assets. It provides a more integrated and broader view of security, enabling a faster and more effective incident response.
Implementing these IT infrastructure monitoring systems can significantly enhance your organisation’s ability to detect advanced cyber threats and mitigate them effectively.
Add some ML to your monitoring stack, and you can respond more efficiently to different attack types and proactively face new and evolving threats. As a result, you can maintain high levels of security for your IT systems and data.
Even more advantages of IT infrastructure monitoring
Monitoring tools enable the detection of unauthorised activity or anomalies in the infrastructure so you can prevent cyber threats earlier. Being in the know brings benefits in other domains, too:
1. Minimising downtime
By quickly identifying and responding to incidents, IT infrastructure monitoring can reduce system downtime and boost business continuity.
2. Regulatory compliance
Monitoring systems can help maintain compliance with various information security policies, data security standards and regulations, such as ISO27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.
3. Analysis and reporting
Collecting and analysing monitoring data facilitates a better understanding of risks and security processes and provides valuable information for security reports.
4. Optimised resource management
IT infrastructure monitoring enhances resource management by spotting over-utilisation or inefficiencies that may signal a security breach.
5. Improving incident response
Integrated and automated monitoring tools improve incident response processes, enabling faster issue resolution and reducing their impact.
The unquestionable benefits of IT infrastructure monitoring result in an ever-growing segment of tools. Below, I present a subjective shortlist, but there are plenty more options—many of which may respond to your specific needs in highly specialised ways.
But for now, let’s consider the most critical contenders:
What are the best IT infrastructure monitoring tools?
1. Prometheus
Opening the list, Prometheus is a popular open-source monitoring and alerting tool. It uses numeric time-series data and is ideal for monitoring Kubernetes infrastructures, dynamic service-oriented (SOA), and microservices-based architectures.
Prometheus doesn’t have a built-in visualisation functionality, so teams often use it with Grafana.
2. Zabbix
Zabbix is another popular open-source IT infrastructure monitoring solution. It monitors servers, virtual machines, applications, services, databases, websites, and the cloud in real-time.
Its flexible notifications let you configure alerts for almost any event. Moreover, Zabbix offers features such as automated discovery and distributed monitoring.
3. Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring
Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring provides visibility into cloud and on-prem infrastructures thanks to thousands of metrics and over 450 integrations, including Kubernetes, Docker, and Apache Kafka.
Datadog offers consolidated dashboards, anomaly detection, and intelligent alerts for infrastructure health monitoring, with the option to drill down to the status of individual hosts.
In addition to its robust infrastructure monitoring capabilities, Datadog also provides comprehensive security monitoring solutions. These include real-time threat detection, continuous configuration audits, and log management for security analytics. Datadog Security Monitoring integrates seamlessly with infrastructure monitoring, allowing users to correlate security data with operational metrics.
4. Wazuh
Wazuh is a free, open-source security information and event management (SIEM) platform with extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities. It excels at threat prevention, detection, and incident response across various environments.
Wazuh’s lightweight agents deliver deep endpoint monitoring, security assessments, and vulnerability identification. The solution collects comprehensive security data thanks to integrations with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
5. Zeek
Zeek is an open-source network traffic analyser that can be used as an intrusion detection system (IDS). The solution supports operators in investigating suspicious or malicious activity within the network on the application layer.
Zeek’s crucial functionality lies in its ability to generate real-time alerts based on customisable scripts. Based on these, the tool can execute external scripts, triggering automated responses like blocking malicious IP addresses or isolating infected devices.
If you don’t want to wrestle with it on your own, consider enlisting cloud and infrastructure monitoring experts like our team 😊
Seven frequent challenges in IT infrastructure monitoring
As helpful as IT infrastructure monitoring can be for your overall security posture and performance, it’s not a silver bullet. The most common challenges of such systems include:
1. False alarms
Sometimes, IT infrastructure monitoring can generate false positives, leading to unnecessary staff involvement and alarm fatigue among your engineers.
2. Complex configuration
Effective monitoring requires careful configuration and constant updates, which can be difficult and time-consuming, especially in complex IT environments.
3. Mounting costs
Implementing and maintaining advanced IT infrastructure monitoring can be costly, as it requires investing in hardware, software, and staff training.
4. Privacy and compliance issues
Monitoring can lead to privacy issues and requires compliance with data regulations and employee monitoring.
5. Over-reliance on technology
Excessive focus on technical aspects of IT infrastructure monitoring may lead to overlooking other vital issues like enforcing security policies and raising employee awareness.
6. Qualified personnel
Security systems like XDR or SIEM are extensive and require ongoing staff training. This can make finding suitable talent in the labour market difficult.
7. Data management
Monitoring systems can generate large volumes of data, which can be difficult to manage without additional storage and analysis resources.
Too much extra information can make it tricky for engineers to oversee and control IT infrastructure monitoring systems properly. Automation and orchestration are critical to making such processes more manageable.
IT infrastructure monitoring needs automation and orchestration
In the context of IT infrastructure monitoring, automation involves streamlining tasks like data collection, analysis, and response to reduce manual effort and errors. Orchestration coordinates the work of different tools, processes, and configurations to ensure seamless integration and workflow efficiency.
Let’s dive into more details below:
Key uses of automation in IT infrastructure monitoring
Automation is particularly beneficial for threat detection and assessment. By automating the process of infrastructure scanning, monitoring systems can continuously check for vulnerabilities and suspicious behaviour.
As a result, you can immediately identify all attack vectors and quickly assess the levels of risk associated with potential threats.
Another prominent use of automation is threat response. Advanced tools can automatically respond to the threats they detect, such as isolating infected systems, blocking malicious network traffic, or applying patches to vulnerabilities.
Such capabilities help teams reduce potential damage before a threat spreads in the network.
Key uses of orchestration
Orchestration is useful in integrated incident management. By coordinating security and business tools and teams, orchestrators enable faster and more efficient response to dangers.
For example, when your system detects a threat, it can automatically notify all relevant teams, trigger emergency procedures, and initiate remediation processes.
Orchestration is also crucial for scaling incident response. As your IT infrastructure grows in complexity and size, orchestration mechanisms enable the scaling of necessary incident management processes.
Automated workflows allow for managing multiple incidents simultaneously, ensuring appropriate addressing of all threats regardless of their number.
Summary
The need for robust monitoring is more evident than ever in the digital transformation era. As organisations rush to adopt new technologies, cybercrime is also on the rise.
You must invest in observability and IT infrastructure monitoring to gain the upper hand over threat actors.
Monitoring enables the detection of attack attempts and reduces digital risks by spotting anomalies. Deploying technologies such as SIEM, IDS/IPS, and XDR, IT infrastructure monitoring systems enable more effective prevention and response to cyber threats.
As the complexity of monitoring systems grows, they generate vast volumes of data, so it’s essential to consider implementing automation and orchestration mechanisms.
With the numerous IT infrastructure monitoring solutions available, selecting the right one can be daunting—and that’s where the Tenesys team comes in.
Contact us today to discuss your specific IT infrastructure needs, and let’s build an optimal monitoring solution for your business.
About the author:
Patryk Zawieja is a highly skilled DevSecOps expert at Tenesys, renowned for his deep knowledge in the security field. Beginning as a Junior SecDevOps, he swiftly mastered both cybersecurity and DevOps, gaining extensive expertise in cloud security. Patryk holds the AWS Security Specialty certification, underscoring his proficiency in protecting cloud environments. His journey is marked by adaptability and continuous learning. Patryk is dedicated to mentoring the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.