Reinforce your assets security by following the basic principles

There are three basic types of activity in information security – those that should be performed periodically to reduce possible risks to minimum.

Periodic updates is one of them: as software pieces are being developed and enhanced, it is required to update them for many reasons, one of them being possible vulnerabilities.

Backups are another one; no storage media can keep data indefinitely long; inevitable errors (both hardware and human ones) can result in unexpected data loss; backups can’t prevent data loss directly, but allow to time required to restore system to its expected capabilities.

Monitoring is the third principle: it allows not only to detect and foresee possible problems, it also allows gathering stats to derive possible trends, to see long-term changes.

The above mentioned activities are corners stones of information security; IPHost can be used to ensure all of them are performed as expected.

Updates

In modern operating systems, it is possible to inquire information on whether updates are available for either OS itself or software components installed. By monitoring that information, required updates can be detected and correspondingly warned about.

That also includes checking whether OS requires reboot, whether SSL certificates should be renewed, and so on. Every time-limited resource can be viewed as the one requiring an update (renewal) at some moment, and monitored as such.

Backups

Backup copies are usually stored on external media – either on dedicated physical devices, or “in the cloud”. In either case, storage media should be monitored for both presence of actual copies, and for its performance and capacity (if either degrades, it’s time to make sure there are other backup media in use).

Typically, SNMP, HTTP(S) and generic (Script or program, Python script etc) monitor types can be used to monitor the mentioned performance values. The exact choice of monitor(s) depends on the exact situation.

Monitoring

Typical mistake is to ignore monitoring presence checks. Talking about IPHost, it’s a software component that can stop, fail for various reasons. Unless monitoring setup itself is monitored, it can easily stop reflecting the reality.

Straightforward approach would be to use several monitoring setups on different systems. Less expensive approach would include monitoring main IPHost software components – such as monitoring service and its database service.

Conclusion

Feel free to contact us if you would need assistance setting up mentioned monitors; you can also leave a comment below.