Cloud security monitoring: how to strengthen cloud protection

The latest survey by Statista shows that the most important cloud security priorities for business leaders are threat detection and response (47% of respondents), user awareness (46%), and end-to-end visibility and monitoring (43%). Cloud security monitoring can effectively cover these needs and enhance security posture. But how to implement monitoring tools effectively and ensure compliance with cloud security regulations? We gathered the top 8 best practices to help you out.

Cloud security monitoring tools collect log data from multiple servers, instances, and containers. They analyze and correlate this data to detect anomalous activity and alert the incident response team. These tools typically provide the following key capabilities:

• Enhanced visibility: Cloud monitoring tools centralize data and provide a unified view of user, file, and application behavior.
• Auditing and compliance: Comprehensive monitoring and auditing features assist organizations in maintaining compliance with relevant regulations.
• Scalability: Effective cloud monitoring tools handle large volumes of data, ensuring scalability as your environment grows.
• Integration with security ecosystem: Cloud monitoring tools integrate seamlessly with SIEM systems, firewalls, and other security technologies, improving threat detection and correlation across the entire IT environment.

Cloud service providers typically offer built-in security monitoring tools as part of their infrastructure. Additionally, organizations can integrate third-party monitoring solutions or employ on-premises security management tools to oversee cloud environments.

Security monitoring in cloud computing offers numerous advantages that can improve overall system resilience. They include:

• Proactive threat mitigation: Using cloud monitoring tools with behavioral analysis, security teams can detect and address threats early, minimizing attackers' dwell time and preventing escalation. With real-time alerts, automated responses, and threat intelligence feeds, they proactively block emerging risks and keep systems secure.
• Cost savings: Cloud security monitoring helps reduce costs by preventing data breaches, minimizing downtime, ensuring compliance, and optimizing resource use. Early threat detection lowers recovery expenses, avoids regulatory fines, and mitigates hidden costs from misconfigurations and shadow IT.
• Data protection: Cloud-based security monitoring allows security teams to conduct regular audits and ensure data protection in the cloud. These tools check the security of your systems and offer recommendations for enhancing security measures.
• Enhanced automation: Scripting in security monitoring enables automating processes like reporting, alerts, and infrastructure management. Cloud automation streamlines tasks such as deployment and continuous assessment, helping organizations efficiently manage cloud environments and improve security.
• Uptime boost: Downtime from security incidents can have significant financial and operational impacts. Cloud monitoring minimizes disruptions by identifying and addressing real-time threats, misconfigurations, resource issues, and performance bottlenecks. This ensures a stable environment for uninterrupted operations and business continuity.

Read more: Top cloud security trends to protect your business in 2025

Cloud security monitoring can be challenging without proper expertise and a skilled team. We consulted security professionals at N-iX to share best practices that help businesses smoothly implement monitoring. Here are the most essential tips:

1. Define clear monitoring objectives

It is crucial to understand your needs and goals at the beginning of your cloud monitoring journey. Our security specialists start by aligning your cloud security monitoring strategy with the overall organization's security. They analyze activity within your infrastructure, set specific goals, and then assist in setting up proper rules to monitor logs and events.

2. Evaluate cloud service providers carefully

Assess the security monitoring capabilities of each cloud provider and its ability to integrate with your existing tools and processes. It is essential to ensure that cloud platforms can provide you with necessary features like real-time alerts, continuous threat detection, and seamless integration with existing infrastructure.

3. Reduce false positives

The monitoring system will issue many incorrect alerts or false positives if you do not configure monitoring rules. By configuring policies, our security experts decrease the number of false positives. Though it is impossible to avoid false positives, reducing them will lead to improved accuracy and a quicker response to actual threats.

4. Integrate with SIEM

Combining cloud security monitoring with security information and event management (SIEM) tools allows you to get better visibility and simplify alert management. Integrating SIEM depends on your security needs, organization size, and architecture. For smaller businesses with a single cloud utilizing only a monitoring tool offered by your cloud provider can be enough. Conversely, if you have a large enterprise, hybrid, or multi-cloud architecture, it would be beneficial to use integrated SIEM as well. Our experts also recommend employing SIEM tools to gain centralized visibility across heterogeneous environments and advanced threat detection.

5. Utilize automation

Integrating third-party automation tools can be helpful in analyzing logs more efficiently. They help identify patterns of user activity and pinpoint suspicious actions. Based on this analysis, our security engineers develop proper monitoring rules that will help avoid false positives in the future.

6. Threat hunting

In addition to routine log monitoring, it is crucial to take a proactive approach and search for cyber threats that may be undetectable by automated tools. This is a manual and more sophisticated approach to threat intelligence that can identify hidden or unknown vulnerabilities and prevent a breach. However, threat hunting requires a more extended skill set. You can partner with a security consultant, like N-iX, to leverage their expertise and strengthen your security posture.

7. Prioritize alerts

Connecting monitoring alerts to platforms like Slack, Jira, and SIEM helps automate and streamline the alert pipeline. They also prioritize alerts before their collection. Ranking them based on severity, potential impact, and relevance ensures that high-risk threats are addressed promptly. This approach prevents teams from being overwhelmed by low-priority warnings.

8. Analyze your metrics for improvement

Monitoring, assessing, and analyzing your performance metrics is essential to enhance your security posture. Our security team always recommends continuously refining your monitoring processes to stay ahead of evolving threats and ensure long-term efficiency and resilience.

If you are looking for a trusted partner with expertise in cybersecurity and cloud technology, N-iX can help you. With over 2,200 tech professionals and 22 years on the market, we have broad expertise in cloud transformation, security architecture design, threat detection, and compliance monitoring. Our team of over 400 cloud professionals can help you establish robust cloud security practices and avoid common vulnerabilities. As an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, Microsoft Solutions Partner, and Google Cloud Platform Partner, N-iX leverages best-in-class tools and methodologies to implement security monitoring in the cloud. We also adhere to industry-leading security standards such as PCI DSS, ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and GDPR, keeping your data protected throughout your cloud journey.

Have a question? Talk to N-iX expert!