Monitoring as a Service (MaaS)

Monitoring as a Service (MaaS) is a security service that provides security to IT assets of any business 24/7. It plays a vital role in securing an enterprise or government clients from any possible cyber threats. MaaS is a monitoring service that can be outsourced in a flexible and consumption-based subscription model.

With the advent of cloud computing, MaaS has gained more popularity. In this content we will discuss Monitoring as a Service (MaaS) in brief, we will also discuss its key features along with the advantages of MaaS.

Content: Monitoring as a service in Cloud Computing

1. What is Monitoring as a Service (MaaS)?
2. Features of Monitoring as a Service (MaaS)
3. Advantages of MaaS
4. Key Takeaway

What is Monitoring as a Service (MaaS)?

Monitoring as a Service (MaaS) provides you with the security solutions that are essential for the organizations that are reliant on the IT infrastructure. However, for effective and efficient monitoring, the organization must have up to date technology, experts knowing advanced technical skills, scalable security processes and all this come with a tremendous expense.

Prior to the advent of electronic gadgets that are used for providing security services, the human resource was used to perform all these monitoring activities but it was ineffective.

MaaS provides an effective solution to this problem. It provides 24/7 real-time monitoring, reports any issue across the security infrastructure and secures the crucial data of their customers.

If compared to the traditional security operations centre MaaS exceed in two important things:

1. The total cost of ownership was higher in the traditional security operations centre.
2. Traditional security operations are less effective.

Features of MaaS

1. Protection Against External and Internal Threats
The security monitoring services analyze the alerts from security devices 24/7 in real-time. The security analyst collects data from various security devices to recognize the threats and thereby imply effective measures to respond to these threats.

• Early Detection
  The information security team detects and discloses the security threats as soon after they appear. The threats are reported to the customer via emails.
  This reports describes the vulnerabilities in the security of the system and also describes its effect on the systems or application. The report may also include the protective measures that you can take for these vulnerabilities.

• Dashboard Interface
  The dashboard interface is implemented as a platform, control and service monitoring. This conceptualizes your system and its resource at one place and eases the information security team to monitor the operation status of the platform being monitor. The information security team try to find the reason of vulnerability by navigating back in time and visualize how the system was performing before the problem occurred and how it is performing after the problem has occurred.
  As the root cause of the vulnerability is understood the preventive measure are suggested to resolve the issue.

• Log Centralization and Analysis
  It is a monitoring solution which involves the correlation of log entries and matching of the log entries. Analyzing this correlation and matching of log entries set a benchmark for the operational performance and provide an index of the security threats.
  An alarm is raised if an incident moves above the benchmark parameters. This alarm or warning is analyzed by security experts responsible for the quick response for such threat incidents.

• Vulnerabilities Detection and Management
  This service provides periodic automated testing which exposes the threat to information system over the internet.
  The service identifies threats such as unauthorized access to the administrative services, the services that have not been updated for a long.

• Continuous System Patching/Upgrade and Fortification
  The level of security is enhanced with the continuous system patching. System patching is nothing but enhancing the computer program to fix the vulnerabilities and bugs in the computer program.
  System patching is very important as it not only raises the security level of your system but also supports the newer version of the application and software installed on your system.

• Intervention, Forensics, and Help Desk Services
  We all are familiar with the help desk that provides you with quick assistance to your problems. Similarly, the MaaS vendor has a team of experts with ample of knowledge that intervenes whenever any threat is detected. They provide 24/7 assistance to support and maintain the applications and infrastructure.
  Whenever a threat is detected it requires the forensic analysis to check out how much time cost and effort it will require to fix it.

2. Delivering Business Values
Most of the customer consider build-vs-buy decision is better if compared to calculating return on investment (ROI).
But when calculated it is observed that cost of building a security monitoring infrastructure along with the security monitoring team is more as compared to the outsourcing a MaaS service provider.

The MaaS vendors have a complete information security infrastructure along with a team of skill and the expert individual who are updated with the latest technology. The MaaS vendors provide the scalable services which is an advantage for their customers. If the company try and built its own security infrastructure it must have to focus on the staff attrition, technical updates, scheduling operations, identifying the vulnerabilities and also find the solution to resolve them. Outsourcing the MaaS services eliminates all these headaches.

Well if you want to evaluate the loss incurred by the external or internal incident the parameters that you must take into account are the amount of loss occurred, frequency of loss incurred and estimate the probability of occurring the loss. This is not an actual method to calculate the loss incurred but it helps you in tracking the security metric.

While outsourcing any service you must consider and quantify the risk involved in it. It will raise your confidence that your investment will succeed. A scalable service is more valuable as the customers can get additional business benefit by giving some additional cost.

3. Real-Time Log Monitoring Enables Compliance
Log monitoring is a process of recording log messages into a file which helps the developers or administrator to understand how the system or application is being used. Real-time log monitoring helps in quick detection of errors, failed process and services.

It also provides alerts for network and protocol failures. It warns the developers of infrastructure problems. MaaS provides automation for this time-consuming process.

Advantages of MaaS

1. MaaS provide a ready to use a monitoring tool to its customer at a very minimal price.
2. MaaS leverage the customer to focus on their business instead of worrying about the information security of their enterprise.
3. MaaS provides 24/7 assistance to its customers, who can report the issues and get immediate assistance from the MaaS team.

Key Takeaway

In this way, monitoring as a service (MaaS) provides you with the security services with minimal investment. The MaaS customer is free from controlling and managing security services.