Quickly Track Unusual Security and Performance Signals with IAM Health Cloud

A Microsoft employee recently discovered a backdoor injected in the open source utility XZ Utils that compromised SSH on a massive scale.

He found the bug chasing a simple problem in his code—SSH log ins were consuming too many CPU cycles, and he didn’t know why. He wasn’t a security researcher or tester, or involved in xz Utils or SSH in a major way, but he chased the problem down, and in the process discovered a major breach.

These kinds of unusual deviations from the norm are important signals for software and network engineers. Even if they don’t seem significant or cause a problem right away, engineers often notice small problems that they intuitively feel they should chase down.

Experienced programmers know to trust their gut, and the feeling that something is just off can lead them down a path to discover serious problems.

But, if you are a manager inside a large organization, how do you let a developer run down a hunch when you have a large business to run?

No matter how much you trust your team, it is hard to justify the business cost of dev hours spent on random errors or mistakes so small they would never matter.

There is a tense balance between scheduling essential business tasks and the creative drive of the most talented engineers in an organization.

Most companies have a story about the one time they could have saved themselves from a nasty situation if they had just keyed in to what one person on the team said.

There is no complete solution, but one way to get more out of your team’s creative insights without a hit to performance is to deploy better data analytics and tracking tools.

IAM Health Cloud is the absolute best solution to track AWS and Azure metadata. It is powerful, realtime, integrated with natural language models, and built into native interfaces. It displays data from every account and organization in a single pane of glass, and gives users access to powerful natural language models that can query and interact with the entire stack.

In its default state it already provides enough for team members to quickly investigate weird events in the cloud environment.

But, it can also help with any investigation that goes beyond the cloud. IAM Health Cloud isn’t just a monitoring and data analytics tool for cloud account metadata—it is a powerful, open data analytics engine that can analyze literally any JSON or .csv formats.

All you have to do is get your data into an S3 bucket. It can pipe in from anywhere—APIs, storage services, anything you can think of—as long as you can get into an S3 bucket (the most common form of storage) in a JSON or .csv format (the most common formats for serious IT work).

Once the data is inside the S3 bucket you can instantly view it in AWS Cloud Watch Dashboards. Custom tables can be filtered, visualized, and worked with quickly. The data can come from any source, and doesn’t require any preprocessing beyond the simple work to make sure it is in the correct plain text format.

It is a fast, efficient way to analyze any data set, and it gives dev teams the freedom to play around a little bit with problems or signals they would normally have to ignore.

IAMHealthCloud is the absolute best way to manage your AWS and Azure cloud environments, and that type of power has knock on positive benefits up and down your organization—including the difficult to measure freedom to chase down what could be a major problem. Contact us to find out how we can help your organization today.