Comparing Cloud Provider Flow Logs
On your marks, get set, Bake! The Netography team has been recently watching “The Great British Baking Show,” and admittedly, we’re ALL hooked. Many of us honed new skills in the kitchen around baking over the last year, so it was no surprise that this theme of our latest binge-watching obsession lent itself to our latest white paper. The concept of a “bake-off” was a perfect model when comparing Cloud Provider Flow Logs.
We first started by looking to see if there was any research published on this topic, and to our surprise, very little has been published about this topic. So it got us thinking of how we could do a technical bake-off between the major cloud providers. We quickly realized that cloud flow logs had MANY aspects that we could compare, so we chose to focus on data latency & data fidelity of network data flow logs.
Some quick highlights of what we uncovered during our research:
- There are no cloud flow log standards that exist today.
- Data Latency is a significant consideration when choosing a cloud provider.
- Cloud providers have been evolving their flow log feature set relatively rapidly.
Why This Matters
With the massive shift of moving services to the cloud, a vast gap emerged in network visibility. As a result, organizations quickly lost the ability to turn on NetFlow or SFlow, which is traditionally used to detect and monitor threats. Public cloud providers have attempted to backfill this hole in the form of flow logs. Of course, as we have found, not all cloud providers are created equal, and there are nuances and differences that practitioners need to consider. We regard this area as a critical point to strengthening an organization’s security posture. After all, you can’t secure what you can’t see.
How Netography Can Help
Netography currently supports Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud. With Netography, the heavy lifting to gain visibility & detection capabilities is all done for you. If you’re interested in seeing how Netography can help you gain visibility in the cloud, please get in touch with us at info@netography or visit us at www.netography.com
If you’d like to look at the recently completed research, you can download a copy here. If you have any questions or feedback, we’d like to hear from you too!