Which IT infrastructure monitoring tools provide the most advanced security monitoring capabilities?

Network analysis tools often provide advanced security monitoring capabilities for IT infrastructure. These tools offer features such as real-time threat detection, anomaly detection, and behavior analysis to identify and mitigate security threats effectively. Look for network analysis tools with robust security monitoring functionalities to enhance the security of your IT infrastructure.

Network analysis tools are essential for maintaining robust IT infrastructure. They offer real-time visibility into data flow, enabling the detection of unusual patterns potentially indicative of security breaches. Continuous monitoring allows for the early mitigation of threats, safeguarding your network. Additionally, these tools play a crucial role in bandwidth management and network performance optimization, ensuring both security and efficiency are maintained. Investing in advanced network analysis tools is fundamental for proactive IT security management.

The most commonly used network solutions nowadays, such as Cisco, Juniper, Aruba, and Fortinet, typically come with advanced security monitoring features built-in. In these cases, the most important aspect is to integrate the network solutions with a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system so that events can be quickly identified and correlated with events from other solutions within your environment, thereby facilitating the identification of the incident's origin and its causes, consequently reducing incident response and containment time. Nevertheless, some used network analysis tools that contribute to security monitoring are: Wireshark, Snort, Suricata, Zeek and Security Onion, among others, each one in a different way.

Splunk offers real time visibility across the enterprise, with advanced threat detection and incident response capabilities. It collects and indexes log data from a wide variety of sources, like network devices, servers, and applications. Solarwinds is another major SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solution that provides comprehensive real-time security monitoring with compliance reporting features. Cisco SecureX provides advanced security monitoring capabilities integrating multiple security tools over a cloud-native platform and offers Security Analytics. IBM QRadar and McAfee Enterprise Security Manager are popular SIEM solution with advanced security monitoring capabilities.

The IT infrastructure monitoring tools that typically offer the most advanced security monitoring capabilities are those known as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems. Examples include Splunk, IBM QRadar, ArcSight, and Elastic SIEM. These tools are designed specifically for analyzing security event data in real time, correlating events across multiple sources, and providing advanced threat detection and response capabilities. SIEM solutions offer features like log management, behavior analytics, threat intelligence integration, and customizable dashboards for comprehensive security monitoring and incident response.

Although I've used advanced log management solutions like ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana), Splunk, and Datadog in recent years, for example, I'd like to highlight Syslog and Graylog. Despite being simple solutions, with well-built automations, they can prove to be highly effective and low-cost solutions.

It’s important no direct access to the infrastructure, minimizing risks of pivoting attacks, and configuration tools are essential in this strategy. Not only do they minimize this type of risk, but they increase efficiency with their automations, enable tracking, and accelerate any rollback processes. Ansible proved to be quite effective in the environments I managed, but Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack were recommended in the benchmarks I conducted. Liquibase/Datical are tools for database configuration tracking. Although the deployment process required expertise from my team, given the lack of maturity of the manufacturer and its partners in Brazil, once implemented, we increased database availability, performance, efficiency and security.

Here are some vulnerability scanning tools that you might find useful, 1.Netsparker 2. Burp site 3. OpenVAS 4.Nikto2 5. Nessus professional Remember to choose a tool based on your specific requirements, budget, and how often it’s updated. Each tool has its strengths and weaknesses, so evaluate them carefully to find the best fit for your projects!

I already presented the identification of attacks through performance monitors in different ways and tools. Using Apollo in applications running over GraphQL or APM solutions as Datadog or Dynatrace, for example. But also, in CDN management systems as Akamai or Cloudflare, which are the most effective point to do that, once you can use their big capacity to identify and treat the malicious traffic.

I understand that allowing or blocking access based on user behavior is the most effective scenario, whether this technique is applied in a business environment, for example, to identify fraud in a payment process, or at the endpoint through an EDR or in IAM with configured conditional access policies. Microsoft's Azure Active Directory (AD) and Intune are solutions that I recommend for layered protection in IAM and endpoint security, but the ideal scenario is to apply this concept at any layer whenever possible.

Some of the IT infrastructure monitoring tools known for advanced security monitoring capabilities include Splunk Enterprise Security, IBM QRadar, Cisco Stealthwatch, SolarWinds Security Event Manager, and McAfee Enterprise Security Manager. These platforms offer features such as threat detection, real-time alerting, log analysis, and behavioral analytics to help organizations identify and respond to security threats effectively. Choosing the right tool depends on your specific security needs, budget, and infrastructure requirements.