Cloud Security Monitoring Tools can help organizations collect advanced threat intelligence and conduct analysis for effective risk mitigation and vulnerability management. A cloud security solution can drastically improve an organization’s security posture and offer a single pane of glass view for monitoring applications. Cloud vendors neglect security by default when designing these platforms, so organizations must pay careful attention to the details.
Migrating to the cloud reduces overall visibility across infrastructure components, so cloud security tools are needed to identify and proactively detect emerging threats across distributed locations. In this blog, we will discuss what is cloud security monitoring and explore the top 10 Cloud Security Monitoring Tools for enterprises.
Table of Contents:
- What is Cloud Security Monitoring?
- What are the Cloud Security Monitoring Tools?
- 10 Best Cloud Security Monitoring Tools in 2024
- How to Choose the Best Cloud Security Monitoring Tool?
- Pros and Cons of Cloud Security Monitoring Tools
- Conclusion
What is Cloud Security Monitoring?
Cloud Security Monitoring encompasses the continuous identification, detection, and remediation of internal and external threats involving cloud infrastructure components, platforms, and services. Cloud security brings enhanced visibility into enterprises, improves flexibility, and reduces security risks. Organizations face the ongoing challenge of being unable to monitor cloud resources and control data when scaling up or migrating to the cloud, and cloud security monitoring tools help with this aspect.
What are the Cloud Security Monitoring Tools?
Cloud Security Monitoring Tools are threat monitoring and analytics solutions that improve visibility across cloud-based applications, networks, infrastructure components, and environments. Cloud security monitoring identifies and eliminates potential risks and helps businesses ensure continuity and compliance. It helps organizations prioritize and mitigate critical issues, enforces security policies, and promotes sensitive data discovery.
Different features are added to these solutions, but every cloud security monitoring solution is unique, and use cases depend primarily on business or enterprise requirements.
11 Best Cloud Security Monitoring Tools in 2024
Cloud security monitoring adopts a proactive approach to security, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every organization will have different security requirements, and with rapid migrations to the cloud from traditional infrastructures these days, it’s essential to secure and protect assets while mitigating various vulnerabilities.
The following are the ten best cloud security monitoring tools in 2024:
#1. PingSafe
PingSafe was founded by one of the world’s top five white hat hackers and offers a world-class Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) to provide unparalleled protection for multi-cloud infrastructure development and deployments. PingSafe is excellent for preventing cloud credentials leakages and comes with an Offensive Security Engine that decodes attackers’ modus operandi and halts them in their tracks. It offers many other security benefits and is one of the industry’s leading cloud security monitoring tools.
Features:
- Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) detects and remediates cloud misconfigurations before deployment.
- Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) adopts a 360-degree approach to cloud security for cloud VMs, containers, and serverless functions.
- Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM) decimates container vulnerabilities and resolves cluster misconfigurations.
- Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) empowers real-time cloud threat discovery, investigation, and remediation.
- Real-time secret scanning for up to 800+ secret types across BitBucket, GitHub, and GitLab
- Continuous cloud compliance monitoring for over 20+ industry standards like ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, NIST, and agentless vulnerability management.
#2. Middleware
Middleware is a cloud observability platform aimed at improving operational efficiency and minimizing downtime. The platform facilitates issue resolution by consolidating metrics, logs, traces, and events on a single timeline, benefiting both development and operations teams.
Features:
Issue Detection: Using AI, Middleware identifies infrastructure and application problems and suggests potential solutions for faster troubleshooting.
Real-time Monitoring: Middleware offers live metrics, logs, and traces on an easy-to-use dashboard, providing up-to-date insights into system, application, and service health and performance.
Efficient Agent: The platform’s lightweight agent ensures fast results with minimal resource usage, seamlessly integrating with existing environments.
Unified View: Middleware’s unified timeline merges various data sources, aiding in root cause analysis and comprehensive problem resolution.
Security Integration: Middleware integrates with cloud services like AWS, enabling extensive log monitoring, including security-related logs. This helps detect unusual activities and potential security threats, bolstering cloud security.
#3. Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Microsoft Defender for Cloud protects organizations from cyber threats and unifies security management across multi-cloud and multi-pipeline environments. It combines the capabilities of Development Security Operations (DevSecOps), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), and Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP). It offers a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) that continuously incorporates good security and software development practices.
Features
- Contextual code pipeline insights
- Centralized policy management and multi-cloud coverage
- Security score, data-aware security posture discovery, and attack path analysis
- Microsoft Entra Permissions Management
- Cloud Security Explorer
#4. Lacework
Lacework is one of the most popular cloud security monitoring tools that offer automated threat elimination, intrusion detection, and one-click investigations across Azure, GCP, AWS, and private cloud environments. It supports the latest compliance standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOC 2.
Lacework can do stringent security audits, secure containers and workloads, monitor critical account activities for changes in network configurations, and fix issues.
Features
- Self-service code security
- CWPP, CSPM, IaC security, vulnerability management, and more
- Identity analysis and policy management
- ISO Compliance
#5. CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security
CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security gives comprehensive visibility across workloads, endpoints, data centers, and multi-cloud environments. It follows a unified security approach and consolidates its services through a single agent to solve the issue of fragmentation. The platform captures trillions of events per day across the world and has successfully protected 23,000+ customers.
Features
- Centralized Observability and log management
- Identity protection, unified cloud security, endpoint security, and next-gen XDR
- Advanced threat intelligence
- Managed detection and response services
#6. Coro Cybersecurity
Coro Cybersecurity provides unparalleled protection for devices, cloud apps, data, and users. It offers simplified reporting capabilities and features an all-in-one security stack that enforces continuous compliance and governance policies. Coro Cybersecurity automatically eliminates critical threats and can scan for malware, ransomware, and phishing attacks. It can also identify and block insider attacks, track malicious activities, and prevent confidential information leakage by identifying regulatory violations.
Features
- Advanced threat protection and access control management
- Anti-phishing, anti-spam, and anti-malware
- Account takeover prevention, threat intelligence reporting, and quarantine
- Auditing and compliance
#7. Sysdig Secure
Sysdig Secure is one of the best cloud security monitoring tools for advanced end-to-end detection and response. It provides automated risk prioritization and real-time threat detection across hosts, containers, and cloud environments. Sysdig can also spot privilege escalations, crypto miners, and Log4J vulnerability exploits, making it a leader in runtime security.
Features
- Incident Response, vulnerability management, and threat detection
- Infrastructure as code validation
- Configuration and permission management
- Cloud-native security, advanced risk prioritization, reporting, and analytics
#8. Amazon GuardDuty
As one of the most adept cloud security monitoring tools, Amazon GuardDuty does an excellent job in continuously monitoring cloud environments for signs of malicious activities and unauthorized behaviors. It secures Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) workloads, container applications, AWS accounts, and Amazon Aurora databases.
Features
- Intelligent cloud threat detection
- Centralized security management
- Automation, high data accuracy, & multiple security feeds analysis
#9. Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic transforms complex data and delivers simplified insights for effective threat remediation and security audits. It is one of the industry’s top cloud security monitoring tools and is best known for improving cloud security posture. Sumo Logic can do credit licensing, tiered analytics, out-of-the-box audits, and compliance management and is secure by design.
Features
- Integrated log analytics platform for LOB and DevOps teams
- Rapid threat investigation and resolution with AI and Machine Learning
- Cloud-native integrations and enhanced infrastructure visibility
#10. Ermetic
Ermetic streamlines Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) operations and takes an identity-first approach to Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM). It performs deep risk analysis, threat detection, and reporting and can do full asset discovery scans. Ermetic is one of the more famous cloud security monitoring tools on the list, as top global companies like Norwest Venture Partners, Accel, Target Global, Qumra Capital, and others fund it.
Features
- Workflow management, custom reports, and pre-built dashboards
- IT governance, identity and access management, and auditing
- API integrations, anomaly detection, and cloud gap analytics
- Data loss prevention and compliance monitoring
- DLP configuration and policy enforcement
#11. F5 Distributed Cloud App Infrastructure Protection (AIP)
F5 Distributed Cloud App Infrastructure Protection (AIP) is known for its cutting-edge cloud workload protection and telemetry services. It delivers high-efficacy intrusion detection to clients for cloud-native environments, enhances business agility, and improves the total cost of ownership for the owners of organizations. Its most significant advantage is that it effectively minimizes threat attack surfaces, and the platform can mitigate app vulnerabilities, exploits, and botnet attacks, thus making it one of the best cloud security monitoring tools.
Features
- Multi-cloud networking and global application performance enhancement using DNS, CDN, and App Stack
- SaaS-based web application firewall, advanced API security, L3-L7 DDoS defense, and bot protection
- Single sign-on capabilities, F5 application traffic insights, and globally distributed load balancing
- DDoS mitigation, uptime SLAs, cloud/edge app management, and secure Kubernetes gateways
How to Choose the Best Cloud Security Monitoring Tool?
When choosing the best cloud security monitoring tools, it’s essential to keep in mind the following features:
- Comprehensive Visibility
Cloud workloads and applications are distributed; many tools can help centralized infrastructure components. It’s critical to get end-to-end tracing capabilities, prevent oversights, and reduce response times.
- Native Cloud Integrations
Custom integrations or tools that offer native cloud integrations with other security services are another critical aspect. Ensuring continuous and regular updates of these integrations should also be included.
- Scalability and Pricing
The pricing structure of cloud security monitoring tools should be balanced with the number of devices they support and the list of features. Cloud security monitoring solutions that offer flexible pricing options are reasonable. Regarding scalability, these solutions should be able to analyze, collect, and process high volumes of data in real-time across cloud workloads, applications, and services throughout multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
Pros and Cons of Cloud Security Monitoring Tools
Here are the pros of using cloud security monitoring tools:
- Increased accessibility – Cloud-based security monitoring tools safeguard sensitive information and can monitor suspicious activities from any location
- Scalable – Cloud security monitoring solutions can be scaled up or down per business requirements. Organizations don’t have to commit to vendor lock-in periods, and cloud vendors follow a pay-as-you-go pricing model, meaning there are no upfront subscription costs.
- Less expensive – Cloud security monitoring tools are less costly than traditional security solutions. There is no need to invest in special hardware or equipment. Businesses don’t have to worry about operational delays or downtimes since there’s no hardware failure.
- Secure data storage, backup, and recovery – These solutions provide secure data storage and backup during disasters. Data recovery is easy; organizations can acquire peace of mind as their assets stay protected.
The cons of cloud-based security monitoring solutions are as follows:
- No data control – Businesses don’t have complete control over their data and may have to adhere to specific compliance regulations set by cloud vendors
- Requires Internet – The most significant disadvantage of using cloud security monitoring tools is that they require constant internet access. Organizations cannot defend or protect assets if an attack occurs and there is no network connection.
- Bandwidth issues and lack of reliability – Depending on the business size, the internet bandwidth may not be enough to support all applications. It can cause severe performance issues. There is a lack of reliability as well since cloud services can go down without warning at any time due to technical problems from the vendors’ end.
Conclusion
The above Cloud Security Monitoring Tools are the best in the industry and secure everything from assets, resources, and access to various cloud accounts and services. Organizations that want to scale up fast and improve their cloud security posture management will find these solutions effective. Ultimately, it’s essential to remember that cloud security follows an iterative approach to safety, and most organizations get the best results by combining these tools for faster investigations and active threat remediation.
Cloud security monitoring tools can help organizations collect advanced threat intelligence and conduct analysis for effective risk mitigation and vulnerability management. A cloud security solution can drastically improve an organization’s security posture and offer a single pane of glass view for monitoring applications. Cloud vendors neglect security by default when designing these platforms, so organizations must pay careful attention to the details.
Migrating to the cloud reduces overall visibility across infrastructure components, so cloud security tools are needed to identify and proactively detect emerging threats across distributed locations. In this blog, we will discuss what is cloud security monitoring and explore the top 10 cloud security monitoring tools for enterprises.
Cloud security tools can help organizations collect advanced threat intelligence and conduct ana.
