Many DevOps teams work proactively to meet DevOps security and compliance standards. They consider security best practices when developing software with open-source components, scanning code for vulnerabilities, deploying changes, and maintaining applications and infrastructure. Security is a key feature of many of the tools they’re using, and the policies and industry standards they’re following.
While security concerns continue to be top of mind for the software industry, the importance of continuous security monitoring over what’s actually running in production environments is often overlooked. In the current climate, this is essential to keep your business (and your customers) fully protected from cyber threats.
There’s currently a big focus on supply chain, SBOMS, and so-called “golden paths,” to production. While these are a good start and will enhance your security, even when executed perfectly they can’t guarantee that the software running in production is compliant and secure.
That’s where continuous security monitoring software that tells you what’s actually running in production comes into play.
Why Does Security Monitoring Software Matter?
Cyber security threats are always evolving. New threats emerge regularly, meaning that security best standards (and, in many cases, regulations) are frequently evolving, too.
In many cases, cybersecurity threats originate from within the infrastructure that businesses create, and the processes they follow. This means that your DevOps team needs to be developing, testing, and implementing code that follows all best practices to reinforce any weak links in the chain.
In addition to training your team to follow certain security standards with code review and compliance monitoring, it’s also important to implement ongoing security monitoring to ensure that your software and code are being implemented as intended.
Internal mistakes, even with steps taken to enforce compliance, can result in weak spots in your system. Even with the best compliance efforts, sometimes there is a threat of someone either internally or externally sidestepping those measures to deploy code with vulnerabilities. Checking the boxes on a security checklist to “ensure compliance” isn’t enough to guarantee security.
Since so many businesses have multiple teams with new changes being deployed daily, there’s much room for potential disaster (accidental or otherwise). Not only could you find yourself out of compliance with security standards, you open the door to potential cyber threats that could cause data theft, tampering, or destruction.
Ongoing security monitoring software can help you flag any potential liabilities so you can address them quickly and determine where they came from.
Since new regulations in both the US and the EU are putting increasing demand on software teams, continuous security monitoring software can help you to prepare for and adapt to changing regulations regarding data security and compliance.
The Advantages of Real-time Detection and Response
Some companies rely on compliance audits or occasional security monitoring, believing that compliance-focused policies will be enough to catch any potential issues. This approach, however, opens you up to significant vulnerabilities.
If there’s a potential weakness in your system, whether it’s an actual vulnerability or a failure to adhere to compliance regulations, you don’t want to wait six weeks to have it pop up on an audit. You want to know right away, especially since you could run a review and have malicious or non-compliant code uploaded an hour later.
This is why it’s important to use security monitoring software that’s truly continuous, not once a week, or once a month, but continuous.
You need to be able to identify security issues immediately with real-time alerts so breaches and incidents can be resolved promptly, before any kind of damage is done. Worst case scenario, you can at least significantly mitigate any damage that does occur by responding quickly.
DevOps teams in highly-regulated industries are often slowed down when their organization has to achieve compliance with new industry standards. In this case, getting real-time alerts informing you of what’s no longer compliant is invaluable, enabling you to move quickly without taking risks.
Choosing the Right Continuous Security Monitoring Tool
If you’re researching continuous security monitoring tools, it’s important to know where to start.
Keep in mind that there’s no “one tool to rule them all,” because so many tools offer different features. The trick comes down to finding the right tools for the right tasks.
Kosli, for example, offers monitoring to help you assess runtime and environment changes to help you determine what code is actually running – and where it came from. We’ll help you connect how changes happen across your tools, which can help you make sense of what’s happening in the logs and dashboards across the rest of your stack.
Here’s what you should look for:
Security compliance and security monitoring: Most tools offer one or the other; they’ll either help your team ensure that they’re following your business’s or industry-required security practices or they work in vulnerability detection, but not both.
Make sure that you’re choosings tools that offer both so that you’re fully protected, because compliance is an important foundation, but you need ongoing security monitoring in case something slips through (which it often does at scale).
Budget compatibility: Any tool that you choose should align with your existing budget. Remember, though, to consider the costs of a potential cybersecurity threat, or the costs associated with a failed audit when determining how much you’re willing to spend.
Scalability options: A large DevOps team needs a security monitoring tool that can work at their scale. Some tools have strong limitations here, so choosing software that’s compatible with the choices made by your DevOps team will be a huge advantage.
Integrations with your existing tech stack: It’s important to choose a tool that will work with your existing workflow. Consider what integrations are available with both your security and DevOps tech stacks and infrastructure to minimize disruption.
Final Thoughts
Continuous security monitoring is essential for all businesses, but especially those in highly regulated and rapidly changing industries, even if you already have a big focus on compliance.
Taking proactive steps will help you to secure your systems both short-term and long-term, and to keep your systems compliant. This can be an enormous cost-saver, and it can prevent significant issues and expenses down the line.
Interested in learning more about continuous security monitoring software? See how Continuous Monitoring Software can help you build stronger security (and security compliance) at every stage of DevOps production.