Threat Detection in the Public Cloud: Cloud Security Solutions

LogRhythm Cloud Security Graphic

There is no debating it; the public cloud is here to stay, and therefore, the need for cloud security solutions continue to increase. According to Gartner, spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021, totaling $304.9 billion dollars globally. Virtually every market study and research report corroborate the statement for public cloud adoption — and there’s no mystery why. In many cases, the public cloud offers distinct cost and time-to-market advantages over legacy buy-and-build approaches.

Some enterprises have capped their on-premises environments and established hybrid architectures that allows them to shift investments and workloads to the public cloud. Other enterprises are more aggressive, going all-in with the public cloud, either with a single provider or in a multi-cloud configuration with multiple public cloud providers.

Public Cloud Security Threats, Challenges, and Risks

While the move to the public cloud is underway, it is not without significant security challenges and risks. The public cloud is fundamentally different than what security teams have been working with for the last 10 to 20 years. Traditional security tools and techniques cannot keep up with the digital demand of everything being virtualized and blurring traditional security boundaries significantly.

When migrating to the public cloud, IT and security professionals are challenged with things like:

  • Visibility into cloud environments
  • Implementing a consistent and reliable security architecture
  • Executing proper identity and access management (IAM) protocols
  • Compliance complexity
  • Consistent security policy and monitoring across multi-cloud security environments
  • Consolidating alerts and prioritizing threats
  • Cloud misconfigurations
  • Insecure interfaces and APIs

All of these examples make cloud security a real challenge. Vulnerabilities in these areas can result in major data breaches that can lead to a negative impact on an organization’s brand reputation, customer loyalty, loss in intellectual property, major financial implications, legal liabilities, and more.

What are the risks to your business? For so many organizations, the need for effective cloud security solutions are evident.

Endpoint and Network Detection Coming Up Short

Clearly, the lift-and-shift approach will not work to secure the public cloud — legacy tools and techniques aren’t up to par as the rift between endpoint and network detection continues to grow.

Many of the boundaries between endpoint and network detection are artificial. When things move to the cloud, the boundaries become increasingly unnatural since everything in the cloud is a workload of some sort.

If you want to maximize visibility, as well as your correlation and anomaly detection capabilities, you need full access to network, operating system, and workload level data.  This is what MistNet NDR by LogRhythm, a cloud-based, machine learning (ML)-driven network threat detection and response solution, delivers. By breaking down the barriers between endpoint and network detection in the cloud, you get the fullest picture across the entire attack surface.

Traffic Mirroring is Good, but it’s Not Enough

Traffic mirroring has been gaining a lot of attention recently since AWS introduced its VPC Flow Mirroring capability. Similar to Microsoft Azure’s vTAP feature, this allows the mirroring of network traffic to be sent to out-of-band security appliances for monitoring, inspection, and analytics.

Legacy network traffic analysis companies now claim their solutions are complete thanks to these new mirroring capabilities. While we support these capabilities as well, we believe this only represents half the picture. Without detailed instrumentation at the operating system and workload level, gaps and dark spots will persist.

A New Formula is Needed for Pervasive Threat Detection in the Cloud 

MistNet NDR raises the bar for data security in the cloud and threat detection. Deployed in minutes, MistNet NDR provides instant visibility across all your public cloud instances spanning AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. MistNet NDR delivers complete visibility into every network transaction with automated detection and rich investigation. Unlike legacy network traffic analysis vendors, we correlate this information with your applications, containers, and Kubernetes clusters providing actionable, intelligible security narratives. Here is a closer look at some of the capabilities:

  • Full Deep Packet Inspection: Complete deep packet monitoring with support for 40+ protocols
  • Cloud DVR: Metadata record of all network transactions traced to individual cloud workloads
  • Comprehensive Detection: Rules, threat intel, file inspection, and behavioral analytics map to NIST and MITRE ATT&CK™ models
  • Forensic Packet Capture: Retain full packets for forensics and compliance

Best of all, MistNet NDR’s patent-pending AI-driven distributed analytics architecture, TensorMist-AI™, means zero data movement between clouds. Plus, TensorMist-AI, analytic processing is co-located with our collection engines. This provides the ability to collect and enrich security data ‘on location,’ generating accurate behavioral models and threat models without having to move any of the data.

Learn More About LogRhythm’s Cloud Security Solution with MistNet

In 2021, LogRhythm acquired MistNet, a cloud-based analytics platform that delivers network visibility and threat detection. LogRhythm’s comprehensive SaaS platform and cloud collection capabilities, combined with MistNet’s distributed analytics, empowers customers to manage their security and compliance needs like never before.

Learn more about the acquisition and latest security capabilities here.