As a CIO/CTO, you understand the difficulties associated with consistently monitoring threats; examining security performance; and implementing system updates to your corporation’s cloud computing environment. Collating this kind of data is time-intensive. Without the presence of modern telemetric intelligence, oftentimes IT teams are left with unmanageable data loads.
Due to the nature of the cloud, you must prioritize security and performance across all endpoints and applications. According to IDC, more than two-thirds of enterprise software will be built for cloud-based offerings. The volume of data generated from these elements will be very high, so you must ensure you have a procedure where the data is stored in an environment that is both easy to access from a trusted administrator but is also protected via encryption, passwords, or other security methods.
What Are Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)?
Within the context of cybersecurity, advanced persistent threats (APTs) are extremely capable, resourceful, and innovative cybersecurity actors, who are skilled in the art of stealth cyber-operations, such as cyberespionage, eCrime (for financial gain), hacktivism, etc. Oftentimes, APT actors are sponsored by rogue nation-states, clamoring to impose their political interests and agendas on a global stage.
Some common examples of APT activities include advanced network lateral movement, critical data exfiltration, IP address spoofing, VPN intrusion, information operations (misinformation, disinformation, and/or malformation), etc.
Responding To Advanced Persistent Threat Activities
The response and management of advanced persistent threats (APT) should be at the top of your IT team’s priority list. Due to the difficulty associated with detecting and mitigating APT activities, without leaving other IT functions to suffer, is a skill that IT teams with unlimited resources have decided to automate.
The health of your cloud infrastructure will largely depend on how efficiently you are managing your cloud assets, including storage, applications, and users. To maximize speed, productivity, and security, you should take the following measures:
- Adopt a consistent cloud detection, response, and mitigation element to set a benchmark on your IT team’s capability statements.
- Data should be stored categorically in protected locations within the cloud, instead of being dumped randomly within a folder – When data becomes unorganized and clumped, it can become an easy target for threat actors who work under the radar of your network.
- Invest in automated threat intelligence, to comfortably manage and prioritize data as it becomes available to your IT team.
- Build a more robust security profile – Use MFA, VPNs, complex passwords, IP tracking for suspicious logins, and train your staff to recognize dangerous web traffic (malware, spam, viruses, etc.)
- Optimize the user-experience – If employees don’t need certain controls, don’t give them these privileges, simplify their access, and grant access to only people you know need it. This way, all authorizations redirect to the same few places, instead of to everyone.
When persistent threats lie within multiple endpoints, it can be hard to identify the root cause of the problem when it comes to having an underperforming cloud application. Data loading speeds may seem slower than required, and often HTTP requests can fail intermittently – while this may be due to the nature of the public cloud being hosted in a remote data server, it could also indicate that an internal issue is to blame. Remember that not all cloud activities can be directly managed by your cloud provider.
What is Cloud Telemetry? Will It Protect Against APTs?
Cloud telemetry is seen as the recording and transmitting of all data generated within the cloud computing environment. Cloud telemetry may seem like a walk in the park, but with the dynamic nature of the cloud comes the task of having to constantly update security procedures and application monitoring methods. Performance issues are one of the top ways threat actors seek out your company for stealing data and infecting you with malware.
When your cloud computing environment is not powered by the right automation, and data is not stored, backed up, and distributed accordingly, you risk allowing threat actors to target vulnerable ports and endpoints. These kinds of entry methods can go unnoticed when you do not make proper use of cloud telemetry.
Cloud telemetry should be leveraged so that your IT team can rely on a robust and automated response tool to cover their blindsides. Your cloud infrastructure should be monitored all the time, and no human worker can accurately monitor every operation, even if you would like them to. Luckily, telemetry in the cloud is easy to deploy and it scales up as your company’s data load grows.
As a CIO/CTO, you may have a habit of tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), so a cloud telemetry deployment should be able to track any security or performance issues you would normally check yourself anyway. A key measure to approach is the amount of information you expect to receive at any one time for the operations of your cloud data and applications, and how much of this data you plan to store.
To mitigate security risks, automating this process with telemetry should improve your detection and response to advanced persistent threats. You will find anomalies in your data through telemetry, and these can be used to leverage better security tools and better performing cloud-based data hosting methods that can disable such threats before they can disable your data, operations, or administrative accounts.
Mitigating Emerging Threats Within Cloud Environments
To mitigate ongoing threats within your cloud infrastructure, you should utilize telemetry. Cloud telemetry will help you monitor your cloud applications, infrastructure, and general user-experience for speed, performance, health, and threats. The likes of advanced performance monitoring (APM) and health logs will allow you to decide whether certain cloud-based applications need more attention, better data management, or in some cases, scaling back.
Data generated from cloud applications is often sensitive and high in volume, and when threat actors can seek this out from your most vulnerable endpoints, they will use common breaching tools like malicious emails and password crackers to gain access to your applications. Any cloud application with poor performance, either as a result of repeated crashes or poor loading speeds, could be an initial warning sign of advanced persistent threats within your infrastructure.
Conclusion
Cloud telemetry is often an overlooked tool with regards to cybersecurity. There is much more available than you think when it comes to the direct management of cloud data to detect any security issues or performance drops. The health of your endpoints and data storage facilities should be one of your top security priorities as threat actors will constantly be targeting vulnerabilities within your network.
Combining threat intelligence with cloud telemetry will guarantee a robust and automated approach that locates anomalous events, performance dips, and security concerns so that you can take the necessary action to improve the user-experience of your active cloud infrastructure. Remember, cloud telemetry is easy to deploy and scale, but if it is not given the direct approach it needs, the data generated from telemetry will not be acted upon – fully automating telemetry may be the deciding factor in your ability to effectively scale up and optimize your cloud infrastructure.
Advanced Persistent Threats will always be a security concern, but if your IT team takes a direct approach to address the root cause, then cloud telemetry will transform your security and performance response procedures, allowing you to scale up safely and efficiently.
