Why Continuous Monitoring of AWS Logs Is Critical To Secure Customer and Business-Specific Data

The Current State of AWS Log Management

Security professionals have used log data to detect cyber threats for many years. It was in the late 1990s when organizations first started to use Syslog data to detect attacks by identifying and tracking malicious activity. Security teams rely on log data to detect threats because it provides a wealth of information about what is happening on their networks and systems. By analyzing this data, they can identify patterns that may indicate an attack is taking place.

Migration to the cloud has complicated how security teams use log data to protect their networks and systems. The cloud introduces new complexities into the environment, as well as new attack vectors. A cloud-centric infrastructure changes how data is accessed and stored, impacting how security teams collect and analyze log data. Finally, the cloud makes it more difficult to correlate log data with other data sources, limiting the effectiveness of security analysis.

Today, security teams have hundreds of AWS-specific tools and services available to consider and potentially implement. Once an organization has chosen a set of services, the logs produced by those same services can be extensive—and the challenges associated with ingesting and normalizing cloud log data can tax the abilities of even experienced security professionals. Security teams must adapt their cloud log management approach to overcome these challenges.

First, it can be difficult to redirect or copy logs out of AWS into an external log management solution. According to Panther's recent State of AWS Log Management survey and report, 48.8% of security practitioners find it challenging to do so.

Additionally, each AWS environment produces unique data that can come from a variety of sources. This data can often be staggering in size and complexity. While the data coming from AWS is complicated enough, it is often siloed in the AWS environment, too — unlinked and uncorrelated with the rest of an organization's data.

AWS customers often find their security teams overwhelmed with the amount of data they need to process in order to detect threats effectively. This data is spread across various AWS services, and teams have little guidance on implementing an effective and sustainable threat detection strategy. As a result, security teams can struggle to identify and respond to threats promptly.

Last year a Google Cloud Blog post stated, "Developing cloud-based data ingestion pipelines that replicate data from various sources into your cloud data warehouse can be a massive undertaking that requires significant investment of staffing resources." This means that most organizations need an easy way to cost-effectively centralize organized AWS logs into a system that has visibility across the rest of their environment. They need a solution that will scale alongside a growing AWS footprint and perform quickly across massive amounts of log data.

Why Continuous Monitoring Is Critical

Organizations must monitor AWS log data to ensure their infrastructure runs securely and protects sensitive information. This is because the infrastructure that runs an organization's application or software may be on AWS and can reveal sensitive information, such as customer credit card data. And in the case of health technology companies, health records, and history are stored in AWS.

Security teams must also continuously monitor their AWS log data in order to detect threats and prevent damage to their networks and systems. By identifying and analyzing patterns in the data, they can identify malicious activity before it causes damage.

In addition to quickly identifying and responding to threats, continuous monitoring enables security teams to correlate AWS log data with other data sources for a complete view of an organization's security posture.

The right log management solution will offer features specifically designed to address the challenges associated with AWS log data. It will also help teams ingest, normalize, and search their AWS logs quickly and effectively.

Conclusion

AWS has increasingly become the go-to provider for cloud infrastructure in the past decade, with more and more companies placing their crown jewels in its hands. This includes most of their regular IT operations, as the cloud provider has become a staple of modern business.

Modern organizations need a cloud security platform that offers a log management solution specifically designed for AWS environments. They need a solution that can support a wide range of AWS data sources with the ability to quickly and effectively ingest and normalize large volumes of data.