By Craig Lusher, Principal Solutions Architect, Continent 8 Technologies. Part of our Cybersecurity Awareness Month series exploring today’s most important cybersecurity challenges and opportunities.
Logs are the security camera footage of your technology.
Every login, failed password, file change and account creation leaves a record somewhere. On their own, these events may seem insignificant. Viewed together, they can reveal the early signs of an attack, often before significant damage has been done.
The challenge is that many organisations still lack complete visibility across their environments. New systems are deployed without being connected to monitoring tools, logs are retained for too short a period, or security teams simply do not have the time and resources to investigate every alert.
These gaps create blind spots, and attackers only need one.
When a security incident occurs, visibility becomes critical. Security teams need to understand how an attacker gained access, which systems were affected and whether the threat has been completely removed. Without the right logs, or sufficient retention, answering those questions becomes significantly more difficult.
For organisations looking to strengthen their security posture, three questions are worth asking:
- Which critical systems are not currently sending logs to a central location?
- If an incident occurred today, how far back could you investigate?
- Who would know if a key system stopped generating logs altogether?
Improving visibility is often one of the most effective security investments an organisation can make. The more complete the picture, the faster teams can identify suspicious activity and respond appropriately.
To help customers achieve this, Continent 8 has modernised the log collector that sits within customer environments and feeds our 24/7 Security Operations Centre (SOC).
The new collector is designed to make onboarding faster and simpler, allowing new systems to be connected in approximately a day instead of weeks. It also processes data significantly faster than the previous generation while requiring fewer computing resources within customer environments.
Importantly, pricing includes unlimited log ingestion within each service tier, removing the need to exclude potentially valuable data sources simply to manage costs.
The service continues to provide the capabilities customers rely on, including 24/7 monitoring, incident review within 30 minutes of alert generation, notification if monitored systems stop sending logs, and long-term log retention to support investigations and compliance requirements.
Good security starts with visibility.
Because if you cannot see what is happening within your environment, neither can you effectively protect it.
To learn more about Continent 8’s managed detection and response capabilities, or to discuss your logging and monitoring strategy, contact your account manager.