Most traditional security solutions in the market focus on the infrastructure of a business and overlook the employees. This creates a blind spot and an obstruction from tracking what data users have access to and what they are doing with it.
This security gap combined with the increasing number of open networks between companies, suppliers, and staff, leaves sensitive data in the wrong hands.
What’s the solution?
A user activity monitoring tool offers full user visibility and control despite what the users are running and what network they’re running on. With this software, you can conduct an audit, monitor, control, and report any end-user activity in good time even as you perform investigative tasks.
Understanding user activity monitoring
UAMs, help you track and monitor all end-user devices, company-operated IT resources, and networks. Many companies and organizations invest in user activity monitoring tools to help them detect and bar threats. These threats can either be accidental or with malevolent intent. The range of the tools employed depends on the purpose and goal of the firm.
When a company seeks to implement user activity monitoring, the primary idea is to identify any questionable move and swiftly mitigate risks before their data is breached.
The working of user activity monitoring
The primary duty of user activity monitoring is to offer protection to your data and ensure that all data privacy and security regulations are adhered to. But these tools do more than just monitor network activity.
In some cases, the software stretches to monitoring different types of user activities, systems, data, and network actions including web browsing and access to unauthorized files.
UAMs use different methods to monitor and manage user activity including:
- Video recordings
- Log collection
- Network packet inspection
- Keystroke logging
- Kernel monitoring
- Screenshot capturing
After collecting information, it’s then scrutinized within the boundaries of the company’s regulations, and the administrators outline if any inappropriate activity has taken place.
But what qualifies as “inappropriate activity”? Well, this is up to the organization to implement the UAM solution and compound anything such as visiting personal sites and others to theft sensitive organization’s data.
Benefits of user activity monitoring in your business
Any level or form of monitoring deployed in an organization can collect enormous amounts of information. The primary purpose of user activity monitoring is to find and filter out any actionable data that’s important in protection processes. With effective systems in place, you can easily detect and scrutinize any form of suspicious user activity.
Additionally, you can determine whether users upload sensitive information to public online platforms or the cloud or take part in any other activity categorized as risky while on the organization’s network. These monitoring tools also ensure that your workers do not access any of your businesses’ confidential data as they leave.
The data collected by user activity monitoring tools must be meaningful and useful. Ensure that its worth by analyzing it for several items, which include;
- Defined policies
- Associated risk
- Time of day
- Identity context
Monitoring tools also identify everyone on your company network in real-time and also share any useful reports and history of their activity. Some of the questions that these systems answer include; what was done, who did it, where, and when was it done.
Also, user activity monitoring assists in identifying abuse and helps lower the risk of unwarranted actions leading to malware and data breaching. Finally, these tools help to lower the cost of compliance as they offer the intelligence required to boost security measures.
Examples of user activity monitoring tools today
There is a wide spectrum of tools used to support user activity monitoring. These sophisticated software tools include:
Targeted tools
These help to track sessions and activity, establishing a full audit for each user.
Privileged account security solutions
These monitor and offer secure privileged account security solutions. They also help in managing policies from a central point.
Real-time alerting system
They identify and monitor user activity from the background and in real-time, then signal IT and security personnel of unidentified activity.
User activity monitoring best practices
User activity monitoring presents a strong defense against various cyber security compromises. Some of the top practices for these software tools include:
- Reduce the number of shared accounts and set strong password regulations
- Establish sophisticated identification procedures
- Deny protocol channels like file transfer between members
Are you using UAMs in your business in 2022?
User activity monitoring is a vital component if you are serious about protecting crucial information in your business. Although there are dedicated point solutions for identifying user activities, businesses should focus on data protection software that can offer activity monitoring features, policy-oriented controls, and improved reporting capabilities.
