PlexTrac ConceptsContinuous Monitoring

Continuous monitoring is an ongoing, proactive cybersecurity practice of constantly analyzing an organization’s attack surface to ensure optimal security. This practice helps detect security threats, IT problems, and compliance issues in real time to resolve them quickly or prevent cybersecurity risks.

Continuous monitoring is important because both an organization’s attack surface and the threat landscape are constantly changing. Adopting a continuous monitoring approach enables security teams to be constantly collecting data across system logs, network activity, applications, which is then immediately analyzed for anomalies, patterns, and potential security threats. Continuous monitoring tools can help automate the process and alert when suspicious activities are detected so teams can react and defend quickly.

Through this proactive strategy, teams can detect issues early, mitigate risks, meet compliance requirements, and optimize their security posture.

The benefits of continuous monitoring include:

• Improved decision-making: Analyze risks and address them effectively based on real-time information
• Better incident management and response: Discover risks early on to address them before potential damage
• Greater visibility: Gain more visibility across your IT assets and minimize mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to remediation (MTTR)
• Automated alerts: Get immediate alerts to address issues as soon as they arise
• Better data correlation: Correlate data across logs to look for suspicious activities

Some best practices to consider when setting up continuous monitoring include:

1. Ensure it aligns with your organizational goals and resources.
2. Analyze costs and complexity to determine what systems you want to monitor considering storage capacity, processing power, and network bandwidth. 
3. Choose continuous monitoring solutions that integrate easily.
4. Encrypt sensitive data where needed.
5. Remember continuous monitoring is an ongoing process that will need to adapt with new systems, processes, and threats.

Continuously monitor, validate, and prioritize your remediation efforts with PlexTrac. PlexTrac enables Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) by serving as the control center for security teams. Ingest and manage the data produced by both your automated and manual testing and then prioritize, assign, and track it through remediation and retesting.

Discover how you can close the loop on your testing and remediation cycle with PlexTrac or request a demo today. 

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