Monitoring and Observability in Cybersecurity

Modern company IT infrastructure is complex and largely depends on the cloud. Therefore, cybersecurity personnel must have adequate visibility and insight into such networks to ward off threats. To gain these insights from a computer network, cybersecurity professionals should have systems to capture the data, process it, and parse the information into useful formats.

 

Once companies gain good insight and visibility into their cloud activity, they should take adequate security measures to protect themselves against the threats they are vulnerable to. Most of them assess the state of their systems through a process called Observability.

 

Observability

 

So, what is Observability? This is the assessment of the internal state of a system by observing its external outputs. The process uses the three key components of a complex system (logs, metrics, and traces) for its assessment. It plays a crucial role in detecting threats, preventing their spread, and preparing a response to tackle them.

 

Besides determining when a cyberattack occurred, observability gives insight into what the perpetrators did during their attack. This information can be used to fortify the system and prevent such attacks from reoccurring.

 

Companies can quickly improve their cybersecurity systems by learning what happened before, during, and after attacks on their network. This is because they will be able to spot vulnerabilities in their network and prevent unwanted traffic from entering or leaving.

 

Monitoring

 

Monitoring is the continuous observation of IT infrastructure to spot cyber threats, breaches, and other vulnerabilities. It is similar to observability, but they serve different purposes.

 

The two concepts complement each other and need extensive data collection to be effective. Cybersecurity monitoring indicates when a system has an issue, while observability helps you understand the issue.

 

Monitoring is the process of collecting and interpreting data, while observability allows cybersecurity professionals to determine how that data affects an organization’s network’s security and business operations.

 

Perks of Observability

 

Observability gives security teams the knowledge they need to deal with cyber threats that can affect their organization. Most companies that embrace observability do so to achieve these three goals:

 

Reliability

 

For a company to rely on IT infrastructure to meet its business demands and customers, its performance metrics must meet certain thresholds. With observability software tools, they can monitor crucial performance factors like traffic capacity, network speed, and others to gauge the reliability of their network.

 

Regulatory Compliance

 

Keeping user personal information secure should be a top priority for companies because it retains consumer trust, and they are obligated to do so. In most countries, governments have regulations mandating companies to keep their consumer data private.

 

Observability platforms give companies a clear view of their cloud computing systems through their event logs. This allows them to identify threats, infiltrations, or attacks before they can access and steal consumer data.

 

Cost Reduction

 

Observability makes it possible for companies to reduce their operational cost. With the analysis of its event data, a company can gather insight into optimizing its network, servers, services, and applications to cut costs.

 

 

Endnote

 

Observability is crucial to cybersecurity professionals because it helps with incident management and detection efforts. They will be able to identify, quarantine, and mitigate threats quickly before they cause irreparable damage to the network. Monitoring complements observability because a system can only be observable if it has been monitored.