What is continuous security monitoring?

There are various risks your organization needs to protect itself from, such as falling out of compliance with frameworks or privacy laws or from hackers that can breach your data. To keep your data and your systems safe, you’ll need to monitor against threats using continuous security monitoring tools.

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Defining continuous security monitoring

Continuous security monitoring refers to an ongoing monitoring system that consistently surveys for security vulnerabilities and monitors your information security controls to ensure your systems and data are protected. It's a tool or process you set up to identify vulnerabilities that could result in a breach. This tool would then alert you of this potential threat in a timely manner so you can address it.

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Why is continuous security monitoring important?

To information security experts, no organization’s security posture is complete without continuous monitoring. New vulnerabilities can arise at any time as aspects of your systems and internal and external software tools are updated and modified. These vulnerabilities could go unnoticed without continuous monitoring in place. Continuous monitoring ensures you’re keeping your data safe and that your controls are as strong as possible. 

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Additionally, continuous monitoring helps ensure your organization maintains compliance with the frameworks it’s committed to. A continuous monitoring tool will let you know if a control falls out of compliance so you can address it. This makes security and compliance a priority for your organization all-year round, rather than just at the time of your audit and makes it easier for you to maintain compliance.  

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As time goes on, continuous monitoring has become increasingly important. As more of our day-to-day tasks and functions become digitized, there is more sensitive information online that needs to be protected. And as governments create more laws and regulations to protect their citizens’ data privacy, there are more requirements that businesses need to adhere to. For these reasons, continuous monitoring is vital for organizations that have or collect data. 

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Do security certifications require continuous monitoring?

Many organizations need to comply with security standards, like ISO 27001. These frameworks can help you set up a secure system and demonstrate your commitment to security to your clients. For many of these security standards — such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001 — you’ll need some form of continuous monitoring to be compliant. 

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Continuous monitoring can also help you adhere to data security and privacy laws, like GDPR. Among other practices, these laws require that you promptly notify consumers and authorities of a data breach. Continuous monitoring software alerts you of a breach so you can better adhere to these laws.

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How does continuous monitoring work?

There are numerous tools available for continuous monitoring and each one has its modalities and variations. Generally, though, a continuous monitoring tool is software that integrates with your data system.

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This software runs consistent scans of your system against its knowledge base to detect when a control isn’t working properly, spot vulnerabilities and signs of a potential breach, and so on. It collects data and reports its findings so you can resolve any issues it identifies. 

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How strong and effective your continuous monitoring is will depend on the software you choose. Each organization has its own monitoring needs based on their possible vulnerabilities, what standards and regulations they need to comply with, and so on. It’s important to choose the right continuous monitoring tool for your organization depending on your organization's needs.

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What are the advantages of continuous security monitoring?

Continuous monitoring provides the following benefits to your organization:

• Provides you a view of your current compliance status and what needs to be done to maintain compliance.
• Tracks data security metrics so you can keep a high standard of security.
• Helps to prevent data breaches.
• Demonstrates your commitment to compliance with reports and dashboards you can show clients, regulatory bodies, and other organizations.
• Monitors changes in your system and how they impact your compliance and data security.
• Makes future audits easier as you easily maintain compliance. 

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With these advantages, continuous monitoring is instrumental in your compliance strategy and prevents potentially severe costs and consequences that can come from a data breach.

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Top continuous monitoring best practices

Follow these best practices to make the most out of the continuous monitoring tool you use:

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Cover all digital assets

Make sure your continuous monitoring tools can access and evaluate all of your digital assets. That includes web and mobile apps, APIs, services, cloud infrastructure, code repositories, all connected devices, SSL certificates, and so on.

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Connect your continuous monitoring to your compliance program

Continuous monitoring systems are designed to tell you when your systems have vulnerabilities. Not all of them will directly tell you if you’re missing security controls that you need for your security compliance, but a tool like Vanta does. Our tools can align with a wide variety of security frameworks to tell you which controls you’re missing and identify areas of non-compliance.

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Supplement adept software with your own knowledge

Continuous monitoring software is an excellent tool, but it can’t handle your security on its own. It will identify risks and vulnerabilities, but you and your team will need to fix them. It’s important to invest in ongoing education for your information security team and to stay up to date on the latest advancements in security to address advance threats as they arise.‍

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Have a clear action protocol

It’s important to have a clear plan in place for addressing any vulnerabilities that your continuous monitoring tool alerts you of. You need a protocol to assign ownership for the threat, ensure that the issue is reported to leadership, and create an action plan for addressing the vulnerability as quickly as possible.

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Finding the best continuous security monitoring tools‍

There are several options for continuous monitoring software available, each one with its specialties. To get the most benefit from your tool, choose a software that can align with the security standards you need to follow and is proven to detect issues ahead of a breach.

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Vanta is the leading trust management platform with continuous monitoring and compliance capabilities, trusted by more than 7,000 companies around the world. Get a customized Vanta demo and learn more about how you can revolutionize your security.

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