What’s the Most Powerful Tool in Your Security Arsenal? 

Trying to work out the best security tool is a little like trying to choose a golf club three shots ahead – you don’t know what will help you get to the green until you’re in the rough.

Traditionally, when people think about security tools, firewalls, IAM and permissions, encryption, and certificates come to mind. These tools all have one thing in common – they’re static. In this piece, we’re going to examine the security tools landscape and understand which tool you should be investing in.

Security Tools – The Lay of the Land

The options available today to the discerning security-focused organization are diverse. From start-ups to established enterprises, understanding who makes the best firewalls or who has the best OWASP top ten scanning is a nightmare. We’re not here to compare vendors, but more to evaluate the major tools’ importance in your repertoire.

Firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems

Firewalls are a must-have for any organization, no one is arguing there. Large or small, containerized or monolithic, without a firewall you’re in big trouble.

Once you’ve selected and configured your firewall, ensuring it gives the protection you need, you might think you’ve uncovered a silver bullet. The reality is that you have to stay on top of some key parameters to make sure you’re maximizing the protection of the firewall or IDS. Monitoring outputs such as traffic, bandwidth, and sessions are all critical to understanding the health and effectiveness of your firewalls.

Permissions Tooling

The concept of Identity and Access Management has evolved significantly in the last decade or so, particularly with the rise of the cloud. The correct provisioning of roles, users, and groups for the purposes of access management is paramount for keeping your environment secure.

Staying on top of the provisioning of these accesses is where things can get a bit difficult. The ability to understand (through a service such as AWS Cloudwatch) all of the permissions assigned to individuals, applications, and functions alike is difficult to keep track of. While public CSPs have made this simpler to keep track of, the ability to view permissions in the context of what’s going on in your system gives enhanced security and confidence.

Encryption Tooling

Now more than ever, encryption is at the forefront of any security-conscious individual’s mind. Imperative for protecting both data at rest and in flight, encryption is a key security tool. 

Once implemented, you need to keep track of your encryption, ensuring that it remains in place for whatever you’re trying to protect. Be it disk encryption or encrypted traffic on your network, it needs to be subject to thorough monitoring.

Monitoring is the Foundation

With all of the tool types that we’ve covered, there is a clear and consistent theme. Not only do all of the above tools have to be provisioned, they also rely on strong and dependable monitoring to assist proactive security and automation.

Security Incident Event Management

The ability to have a holistic view of all of your applications and systems is key. Not only is it imperative to see the health of your network, but if part of your application stack is underperforming it can be either symptomatic of, or inviting to, malicious activity.

SIEM dashboards are a vital security tool which use the concept of data fusion to provide advanced modelling and provide context to otherwise isolated metrics. Using advanced monitoring and altering, the best SIEM products will not only dashboard your system health and events in realtime, but also retain log data for a period of time to provide event timeline reconstruction.

The Power of Observability

Observability is the new thing in monitoring. It expands beyond merely providing awareness of system health and security status to giving cross-organizational insights which drive real business outcomes.

What does this mean for our security tooling? Well, observability practises drive relevant insights to the individuals most empowered to act on them. In the instance of system downtime, this would be your SREs. In the case of an application vulnerability, this would be your DevSecOps ninjas. 

An observability solution working in real time will not only provide telemetry on the health and effectiveness of your security tool arsenal, but will also give real-time threat detection. 

Coralogix Cloud Security

Even if you aren’t certain which firewall or encryption type comes out on top, you can be certain of Coralogix’s cloud security solution.

With a quick, 3-step setup and out-of-the-box functionality including real-time monitoring, you can be sure that your tools and engineers can react in a timely manner to any emerging threats. 

Easily connect any data source to complete your security observability, including Audit logs, Cloudtrail, GuardDuty or any other source. Monitor your security data in one of 100+ pre-built dashboards or easily build your own using our variety of visualization tools and APIs.