What would you believe is by far the most crucial element of the organization? Company’s Performance? Maybe you’re focusing on the bottom line. True, results and profitability are critical. However, security is at the top of the priority list. Any business serves a variety of customers on a daily basis. But how does the importance of security differ depending on whether the user base is small or large? Since, users get a bunch of information at their fingertips, which may lead to unwanted access and data breaches.
So, how we can resolve this unexpected risk? What are the possible solutions? Organizations can control these problems if they keep track of user activities. Monitoring network activities can help organizations to understand end-user behavior. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what users’ employee monitoring activities entail.
We’ll go through what User Activity Monitoring is and how it functions. Moreover, w We will also talk about why we need UAM. Finally, we’ll go through a few excellent monitoring control practices that a company can follow.
What is User Activity Monitoring?
By definition, users’ monitoring activities solutions or UAM are software tools that can track and monitor end-user activity on company-owned IT resources such as devices, networks, and other IT resources. Many companies utilize user activity monitoring software to identify threats and risks. Along with performing key steps to stop these risks, whether they are inadvertent or malicious. Though, the range and types of monitoring and methods used are solely determined by the company’s goals.
Enterprises may easily spot strange activities and manage risks before they occur in data breaches, or at least in time to limit losses, by deploying users’ monitoring activities tools. User activity monitoring, also known as user activity tracking, is a type of surveillance that involves a proactive evaluation of end users’ behavior to evaluate if access credentials or data protection regulations have been misused due to malicious or ignorant intent.
Working of Users’ Monitoring Activities:
The goal of users’ monitoring activities is to safeguard data while assuring availability and adherence to data security and privacy standards. UAM is more than just a monitoring network activity. Rather, it really can track all forms of user behavior, including all sorts of systems, information, network operations, and applications – which includes online surfing, illegal or sensitive file access, and more by the user.
Monitoring network activities can be performed by using different methods. We have recommended a few ways to employee monitoring software for your organization’s end users. These includes:
- Sessions recording both audio and video
- Inspecting network packets
- Taking keystroke logs
- Collecting and analyzing logs
- Monitoring Kernels
- Capturing screenshots or file
To determine if the improper activity is taking place, all of the information obtained must be examined within the confines of corporate policy and the user role. The organization employing the UAM system decides what constitutes”inappropriate user activity,” which might range from viewing personal websites to buying stuff during working hours to stealing any type of company data including financial statements or different intellectual property information.
Benefits of Using Users’ Monitoring Activities
Large volumes of data may be accumulated during any monitoring control level. The purpose of any user’s activity monitoring tool ought to be to identify and categorize any actionable data that helps with data security. You can quickly discover and analyze unusual user behavior if you have appropriate protocols in place.
You may also see whether employees are uploading confidential data to public cloud servers, using any non-approved services and applications, or participating in some other unsafe acts while on the company’s network or resources. User activity tracking solutions may also assist ensure that employees don’t take any of your secret data of the company with themselves when they leave.
Hence, to make your activity monitoring solution productive and healthy, we will make sure that data for each user should be analyzed at different levels. Also assuring that each monitoring network activity includes several items including:
- Risks associated with each activity
- Defined rules and regulations
- Time and date of the day
- Contextual identity
About Users’ Monitoring Activities Tools:
There seem to be several tools that could be used to assist or enhance the monitoring of user activity. These technologies vary from standard security software to specific tools for tracking sessions and actions while producing a detailed audit log for each user.
A protected privilege account to enhance security solutions is also available. Moreover, with the goal of monitoring and protecting privileged account behavior while centralizing policy administration.
Real-time alerting solutions are among the greatest user activity monitoring solutions. In the background, these solutions continuously monitor users’ behavior and alert IT and security professionals when questionable activities are detected. If we do not perform real-time monitoring, there is a high chance of risks may go unreported, while your IT department attends to other recognized concerns.
It is no longer required to have whole IT departments devoted to performing real-time monitoring of each user activity. So, thanks to new technological advances; a solid security solution that enables user activity monitoring can handle the majority of the hard work. These are the few top-rated activity monitoring tools.
- Ekran System
- OptimusHive
- Veriato Cerebral
- ActivTrak
- InterGuard
- Teramind DLP
Best Practices for Users’ Monitoring Activities:
users’ monitoring activities are an essential defense weapon against data leaks as well as other cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Therefore, many security teams lack visibility into how their users access and utilize sensitive data, making them vulnerable to insider threats and external attackers who acquire access to systems. The following are some of the best user activity monitoring practices:
- Make it clear that you are monitoring the network activities of your users. Users must be informed that their sessions will be logged and monitored and that they should agree to this. This acknowledgment is frequently included in commercial or user agreements.
- Give privileged access to just those users who require it to perform efficient work output. Aside from that, any actions that are not essential for a user’s job position should be limited. Though, offering privileged users unrestricted access is unnecessary. Make sure, restrictions for system protocols and admin tools must also be imposed.
- Reduce the number of shared accounts while making strong password regulations a high priority. Additionally, enforcing restrictions should also ensure that account passwords are complex, complicated, unique, and never shared or reused. Furthermore, keep an eye out for credentials that have been stolen.
- Apply strong security mechanisms, such as two-factor or multi-factor authentication, for your privileged accounts.
- Organize remote access using company-specific protocols. Restrict protocol channels like sharing files among members of a group, and disc access sharing and port forwarding.
- Gather and save forensic data as evidence from the chain of custody, such as screenshots, capture files, and keystrokes. Hence, this helps in re-creating the full-context situations.