Cybersecurity threats don't clock out at 5 pm, nor do they take weekends off or go on vacation. And that’s exactly why you need a security system that’s working for you around the clock.
Many organizations still rely on periodic assessments, like annual penetration tests or quarterly audits. The gaps between these scans can create dangerous blind spots where attackers operate undetected. This is where breaches happen and spread.
Continuous monitoring changes this dynamic by providing real-time awareness of what's happening across your network, systems, and applications. It gives you eyes on all the activities taking place in your IT environment 24/7, all year round. Unlike your manned stations and monitoring set-ups, automated monitoring systems will never get tired, distracted, or overwhelmed by too many screens.
Read on to understand the fundamentals of continuous monitoring and find out how to set up a continuous monitoring system with Securden. Now, let’s jump to the details and see how continuous monitoring can keep your IT operations on track.
Continuous monitoring is the ongoing practice of monitoring your computer systems and networks. It uses automated tools that collect key data and compare it with baseline behavior. Unusual activity—such as spikes in network traffic, system log anomalies, or unexpected file changes—is flagged immediately.
The system runs 24/7 without any breaks. It tracks various data points such as CPU usage, network traffic, system logs, and user access patterns. Immediate alerts help your team address issues before they escalate.
Additionally, continuous monitoring is also a crucial component of enforcing the principle of least privilege. Keeping a close watch on user access and system changes helps cybersecurity teams make sure that only necessary privileges are granted. This constant vigilance reinforces your security measures and safeguards your valuable data.
Example: Imagine an employee suddenly accessing restricted financial records at 2 AM—something they’ve never done before. A continuous monitoring system would instantly flag this as anomalous behavior, triggering an alert so security teams can investigate and respond before a potential data breach occurs.
But what exactly makes up an effective continuous monitoring system? Let's break down the key components that work together to keep your organization secure.
Continuous monitoring keeps an eye on your entire IT infrastructure, tracking security risks, system health, and compliance status in real time. It uses automated tools and AI-powered analytics to detect threats early and reduce manual oversight.
Automated Data Collection
The foundation of any monitoring program starts with gathering data from across your network. Your system must track hardware, software, cloud resources, and connections to build a complete picture of your environment.
When an employee's new device or an unauthorized connection appears on your network, immediate detection occurs. Organizations that can't see all their assets face significant security risks—you simply can't protect what you don't know exists.
Vulnerability Scanning
Automated scans search your existing systems for known weaknesses without manual intervention. These run at scheduled intervals or trigger automatically when system changes occur.
After a software update rolls out, for example, scanning might detect several workstations missing critical security patches. This early warning helps your IT security team address vulnerabilities before cyber threats can exploit them.
Behavior Analysis and Anomaly Detection
The intelligence layer establishes baselines of normal operations and flags unusual activity that might indicate potential threats. Many modern solutions incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve threat detection accuracy over time.
For example, an accounting user who typically accesses financial data during business hours suddenly logs in at 3 AM and attempts to download customer databases. Behavioral analysis tools would immediately flag this suspicious activity, potentially preventing data breaches.
Real-time Alerting and Notification System
Timely notifications about security incidents based on predefined rules ensure the right people know about issues when they matter most. Smart filtering prevents alert fatigue while making sure critical warnings receive immediate attention from your security team.
Example: If a new zero-day vulnerability is detected globally, the system updates rules in real-time to block related exploits.
Automatic Alerting Mechanism
Automated response mechanisms kick in when certain threats appear, containing potential damage before human intervention becomes necessary. These precious minutes saved during an attack can significantly improve your security posture.
Example:
If multiple failed login attempts occur, the system:
- Locks the account
- Blocks the IP address
- Notifies the security team via Slack or email
Each part of the system plays a huge role in helping you raise your digital defenses. When these parts work together, you can detect security threats from miles away, giving your security teams ample time to deal with them.
Moving forward, let's explore different approaches organizations can implement for maximum security coverage.
Detect & Neutralize Threats Before They Escalate
Detect anomalies quickly with a system that excels at analyzing data and managing events. Securden demonstrates the benefits of continuous monitoring through smart automation.
Different monitoring methods cover various parts of your IT. Some focus on hardware, others on software, cloud services, and compliance. Implementing a mix of these approaches ensures comprehensive security coverage.
Network-based Monitoring
Network monitoring tracks traffic patterns, connections, and data flows across your digital infrastructure. It helps detect DDoS attacks, unauthorized access, data exfiltration, and abnormal communication with malicious IPs. Network monitoring tools like Securden’s Endpoint Privilege Manager can spot unusual traffic spikes, unauthorized access attempts, and suspicious communication with known malicious IP addresses.
For example, a manufacturing company detects an attacker attempting to move laterally through its network after compromising a single workstation. Their intrusion detection systems will flag unusual port scanning activity, allowing their security team to isolate the affected machine before sensitive production systems are reached.
System-Level Monitoring
System-level monitoring approach focuses on individual devices and servers, watching for changes to critical system files, unusual resource consumption, or unexpected process behavior. System monitoring catches problems that might not generate network traffic. It helps detect unexpected privilege escalations, unauthorized configuration changes, and resource misuse.
Log management tools collect and analyze system events, creating an invaluable audit trail during incident investigations. When properly configured, they can alert you when administrative privileges are unexpectedly elevated or when system files change outside of planned maintenance windows.
Application Monitoring
Application monitoring tools examine the behavior and performance of software components in your environment. They watch for unusual login patterns, unexpected data access, or software bugs that might indicate security problems.
Many data breaches start with application-layer attacks that bypass traditional perimeter defenses. Application control and monitoring serve as your last line of defense against these sophisticated cyber attacks.
Cloud Service Monitoring
As organizations migrate more infrastructure to cloud platforms, specialized monitoring becomes essential. Cloud monitoring ensures security across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud environments by tracking resource usage, access patterns, and security settings. Misconfigurations, such as open storage buckets or exposed credentials, are among the top cloud security risks.
Many high-profile breaches have occurred not through sophisticated attacks but through basic cloud configuration mistakes that escaped detection.
Compliance Centric Monitoring
For regulated industries, continuous control monitoring tracks adherence to specific requirements from industry regulations like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or GDPR. This approach ensures you maintain proper internal controls and can demonstrate compliance during audits.
The ongoing monitoring process generates collected data that, through automated analysis, provides valuable insights to security teams and business leaders. When implemented, continuous monitoring can help strengthen security while improving system uptime and reducing performance bottlenecks.
But for all your efforts to succeed, you need to ensure your approach to continuous monitoring matches your specific risk profile and security objectives. Many organizations also combine multiple types and approaches to achieve comprehensive coverage.
Since you now have a basic understanding of which approach will suit your organization, we’ll now go over how you can put it all into action with Securden's setup guide.
Monitor Smarter, Act Faster!
Capture performance issues as they occur with continuous monitoring that sharpens operational efficiency. Our EPM solution analyzes data promptly, ensuring quick resolution.
Let's get into the practical side. Here’s a simple, step-by-step guide to setting up a continuous monitoring system with Securden’s Endpoint Privilege Manager:
1. Deploy the Securden Solution
Start by installing the Securden server component on your preferred platform. The lightweight installation process takes just minutes to complete, and our intuitive setup wizard will guide you through initial configuration options. Make sure you select a secure server location with appropriate system resources to handle your environment's scale.
2. Discover and Inventory Your Endpoints
Run the built-in discovery tool to automatically scan your network and identify all endpoints requiring monitoring. Securden’s EPM creates a detailed inventory of devices, letting you quickly determine which systems need privilege management and continuous monitoring. Our discovery process works across domain-joined and standalone systems alike.
3. Analyze Local Admin Rights
Use Securden's Local Admin Analysis feature to generate detailed reports of users and groups with administrative privileges across your environment. Upon completion, these reports will help you understand your current privilege landscape and identify high-risk accounts that demand closer scrutiny. This analysis provides a baseline for your security posture improvement.
4. Establish Monitoring Policies
Create custom monitoring policies that define what activities should be tracked on each endpoint type. Different teams might need varied levels of surveillance—your development environments may need different monitoring than your finance department. Tailor your approach by department, role, or sensitivity level of the systems involved.
Enable the application discovery feature to automatically identify programs requiring elevated privileges across your network. This valuable insight lets you catalog applications needing special attention and reveals potential security gaps in your environment. The system continuously monitors and updates this inventory as new applications appear.
6. Implement Real-Time Alerts
Set up alert conditions for suspicious activities like unexpected privilege escalations, unauthorized application usage, or new local admin account creation. Configure these notifications to reach the right security personnel through your preferred channels - email, SMS, or integration with existing security tools. Customize alert thresholds to balance security with notification fatigue.
7. Enable Elevation Trend Analysis
Activate the application elevation trend tracking to monitor patterns of privilege usage over time. This powerful analytical tool helps in analyzing data and identifying unusual spikes in elevated application access that might indicate compromised accounts or insider threats. Look for deviations from established baselines that warrant investigation.
8. Test Your Monitoring Configuration
Perform controlled tests of your monitoring setup by triggering various privilege scenarios and confirming the system responds appropriately. Try creating test accounts, elevating applications, and other privilege-related activities to verify alerts, logging, and reporting functions work correctly. This validation step catches configuration issues before they become security problems.
9. Establish Regular Review Procedures
Create a schedule for regular reviews of risk monitoring data, reports, and alerts. Assign specific team members responsibility for analyzing trends and investigating anomalies on daily, weekly, and monthly cadences. These routine checks transform raw monitoring data into actionable security intelligence.
10. Integrate with Your Security Ecosystem
Connect Securden's continuous monitoring tool with your broader security infrastructure. Integrations with SIEM systems, ticketing platforms, and other security tools create a unified defense strategy. It ensures privilege-related security events trigger appropriate responses within your established security workflows.
Done right, continuous monitoring will soon become second nature for your digital defense system. Follow these steps to configure our Endpoint Privilege Manager and you'll find yourself at the helm of a continuous monitoring system that provides real-time visibility into your security posture.
Control Every Corner of Your Network
Gain full visibility by analyzing data from multiple log data sources. With our EPM’s robust risk monitoring and clear escalation paths, your IT environment stays in safe hands.
With proper implementation, continuous monitoring systems can catch threats that point-in-time assessments miss while dramatically reducing the manual workload of security teams. Once you have a continuous monitoring system in place, here’s a list of benefits you can expect to reap from it.
1.Real-Time Threat Detection That Actually Works
Most security breaches don't announce themselves with flashing red lights. They creep in quietly through privilege misuse, unusual access patterns, or unexpected application behavior. A continuous monitoring system catches these subtle warning signs when they first appear—not days or weeks later during a scheduled security review.
For example, when a user suddenly accesses sensitive systems at 3 AM or a rarely-used application starts requesting admin rights, you'll know immediately. Our early warning system cuts detection time from weeks to minutes, dramatically reducing potential damage from security incidents
2.Shrinking Your Attack Surface Through Complete Visibility
You can't protect what you can't see. Since most organizations don't actually know how many local admin accounts exist across their networks or which applications routinely run with elevated privileges.
Continuous monitoring builds a living inventory of privileged access points across your entire environment. Securden’s continuous monitoring platform automatically discovers endpoints, maps out existing admin rights, and tracks application privilege usage patterns exposing your actual attack surface.
3.Making Compliance a Natural Outcome, Not a Painful Project
Compliance requirements like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and SOX demand evidence that you're properly managing privileged access. Without continuous monitoring, gathering this evidence means painful manual audits and disruptive security reviews.
A properly configured monitoring system automatically collects the evidence auditors need. Every privilege elevation, access request, and admin action gets logged and preserved. When audit time comes around, you'll have ready-made reports showing your controls are working—without scrambling to gather last-minute documentation.
4.Liberating IT Teams from Repetitive Security Tasks
Without automation, your security teams end up spending countless hours manually checking logs, reviewing access permissions, and investigating potential issues. Manually completing all these tasks can lead to burn outs and still miss out on critical threats.
Continuous monitoring automates these repetitive checks, freeing your team to focus on strategic security improvements. The system handles the constant vigilance, alerting humans only when actual investigation is needed.
5.Catching Insider Threats Before Serious Damage Occurs
Traditional security focuses heavily on external attacks, but insider threats—whether malicious or accidental—cause many serious breaches. These threats are particularly dangerous because they originate from authorized users who already have access to your systems.
Continuous monitoring establishes normal behavior patterns for users and applications, making it possible to spot when someone starts acting differently. This behavioral analysis catches the warning signs of compromised accounts or malicious insiders early—when you can still prevent major damage.
The system works tirelessly in the background, watching for the subtle signs that something isn't right. And when potential issues arise, you'll have the context and information needed to respond effectively.
As you strengthen your security posture with continuous monitoring, Securden's platform provides the ideal foundation—combining robust surveillance with practical privilege management that won't disrupt your business operations.
Round-the-Clock Network Protection
Never let a threat slip through with monitoring that works 24/7. Enjoy comprehensive security that safeguards your entire IT environment at all times.
Don't wait for a security incident to expose gaps in your protection. Schedule a demo with our security experts to see how Securden's continuous monitoring solutions can strengthen your security posture
Continuous monitoring keeps your IT systems in check around the clock. Spot issues early and prevent them from turning into bigger problems. Ongoing surveillance is key to keeping your network safe and your operations smooth.
Securden's Endpoint Privilege Manager (EPM) ties all these advantages together. With round-the-clock monitoring and intuitive controls, it makes managing access rights simple and effective. With our top-notch privilege access governance solutions, you can centralize your cybersecurity efforts and keep all the controls under a single roof.
Stay on top of potential threats and ensure only authorized users gain access—all while keeping your IT environment secure. Sign up for a free trial and find out how our platform can protect your most valuable digital assets.
Automate Your Security Workflow
Free your IT team from tedious manual checks and repetitive tasks. Let our system handle risk monitoring and event management around the clock.
