Best threat detection tools for AWS, Azure and GCP

Cloud security has become one of those things that most businesses don’t think much about until something goes wrong. Everything can seem perfectly normal on a Tuesday morning until an employee accidentally exposes a storage bucket or an attacker quietly starts moving through resources unnoticed. And mark you, modern cloud environments are quite complex.

A company might have hundreds of virtual machines running across different regions while managing thousands of user permissions. Agreeably, keeping track of everything manually in such an environment is almost impossible. And it’s partly because of this complexity that threat detection has become a critical part of cloud security. Organisations no longer rely solely on firewalls and access controls.

They also need tools like Orca Security to continuously monitor activity, identify unusual behaviour and alert security teams before small issues become major incidents. At a time when cyberattacks are increasing in popularity, these are not tools you want to ignore. 

And as the attacks increase, so do their costs. According to a recent report by Aircom Global, “the global cybercrime cost could hit US$23tn by 2027, up sharply from US$8.4tn in 2022.” Given these statistics, it makes sense to start thinking about how to improve your cloud’s security.

Native threat detection tools

For most AWS users, Amazon GuardDuty is the right starting point. It’s a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorised behaviour across your AWS accounts. What makes it genuinely useful is that it pulls from multiple data sources simultaneously.

CloudTrail event logs, VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs all feed into it and it uses machine learning alongside threat intelligence to surface anomalies that a human reviewer would likely miss.

In Azure, Microsoft Defender for Cloud performs a similar role, although its approach leans heavily into identity and configuration monitoring. Well, as you may know, many breaches don’t begin with malware or sophisticated exploits. They can start with something as simple as a small configuration mistake. Thankfully, these are the very things Defender is designed to identify.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) users, meanwhile, often rely on Security Command Center (SCC) as their primary threat detection platform. Interestingly, SCC covers more ground than its relatively quiet reputation might suggest by providing:

• Asset inventory
• Vulnerability assessment
• Threat detection across GCP resources

In addition, its Premium tier includes Event Threat Detection, a service that analyses Cloud Logging streams in near real time to identify threats such as malware and unusual data access patterns. There’s also Container Threat Detection, which monitors container runtime behaviour and can identify things like unexpected processes running inside a container.

Top multi-cloud platforms

But what if you run workloads across a mix of AWS, Azure and GCP? How do you even detect threats without jumping between multiple dashboards every day? Well, that’s where multi-cloud security platforms like Orca Security come into play.

Instead of requiring organisations to deploy agents across every workload, Orca uses what it calls a side-scanning approach. In simple terms, it connects directly to cloud environments and analyses workloads and data without requiring extensive deployment efforts. The beauty of having such a centralised platform is that security analysts don’t have to piece together information from multiple sources to get a complete picture of risk.

Remember, lacking a complete overview of how serious an attack is can be very detrimental. You don’t want to have a scenario where a team sees a suspicious activity as manageable in AWS yet fails to realise that the same attacker has already compromised resources in Azure. When security information is fragmented, dangerous patterns can remain hidden until significant damage has already occurred.

Thankfully, multi-cloud platforms like Orca can solve that problem by consolidating information from multiple environments into a single platform. In this way, you get to understand not only where threats exist but also how those threats connect across their infrastructure.

The growing need for improved safety

Imagine a large online retailer preparing for its busiest shopping season of the year. Millions of customer transactions are expected to flow through its cloud infrastructure and security teams know that cybercriminals often target businesses during periods of high activity. The last thing anyone wants is to discover suspicious behaviour after the damage has already been done.

For instance, the activity could result in significant financial losses. As several industry experts suggest, a single data breach could cost you roughly US$4.5m. Now, beyond financial losses, breaches could also damage your reputation. Since customers are also becoming more security-conscious, many of them wouldn’t want to interact with a business that gets involved in cyberattacks.

This is a big part of why you never want to ignore cybersecurity, even for a second. Waiting until an incident occurs to figure out your detection posture should never be the plan. The reality is that cloud environments are only becoming more complex and if you don’t apply the right safety protocol, you may never survive the coming competition.