Organizations can leverage continuous security monitoring using the following best practices:

1. Current historical risk analysis: Provide up-to-date compliance reports and track changes to application structure, versions, and domains to contextualize vulnerabilities in evolving environments.
2. Version supply chain changes: Capture and version all component changes, including container images, SBOMs, and CVEs, for vulnerability mapping and trend analysis.
3. Expose version drift: Track and report on multiple versions of components across environments, enabling quick vulnerability response and consistent versioning.
4. DevOps pipeline integration: Integrate real-time vulnerability analysis into CI/CD, supporting proactive threat hunting across all environments and applications.

1. Current and Historical Risk Analysis

Many industries have stringent regulatory requirements. Continuous security monitoring helps ensure compliance with these regulations by providing up to date reports, thus helping organizations comply with these new regulations.

For these reasons, you need to perform continuous security monitoring of your software supply chain from the first commit to final deployment and beyond, ensuring adherence to internal security policies and instantly flagging vulnerabilities. 

Your continuous security monitoring practices should result in your development and security teams having a shared understanding of every application including: 

• Logical structure
• Deployed versions and releases
• Domains the applications are deployed in

This will provide vital context to vulnerabilities as your cloud-native environment changes and enable rapid identification and response in the event of a vulnerability or security threat.

2. Versioning Supply Chain Changes

Your software supply chain changes every day and, in some cases, every hour. Capturing and versioning the changes is essential for mapping vulnerabilities to release versions, and producing historical trend analysis. IT teams have become accustomed to using source code ‘versions’ to investigate code changes over time.

Best Practices for Component Versioning

Capturing the changes to every component released to end users is an essential feature of continuous security monitoring. It is important to remember that components are deployed independently and frequently. 

A component also is more than just a container image. Components have many attributes that need to be versioned for historical trend analysis. Here are some best practices when creating component versions:

1. Version the SBOM, CVE, licensing, and other details, Key-Value pairs, deployment logic, and endpoint configurations are all part of the component’s configuration and should also be versioned and tracked.
2. Do not change the name of the components and only update the image value with the image tag.
3. Track a version number for every release, using semantic versioning. Calendar versioning can get confusing if a service is changed multiple times in a single day.
4. Use the Git Commit SHA in the semantic versioning number. This helps connect back to the developer’s change.
5. Track all ‘logical’ applications that are consuming the component as part of the versioning strategy. This will provide a clear picture of the impact a single vulnerability has across the organization.

3. Expose Version Drift

‘Drift’ is a common issue across the software supply chain, particularly in decoupled architectures. Drift is created when different versions of a single component run in multiple environments. Continuous security monitoring exposes when multiple versions of the same component are running in different environments. Exposing drift allows DevOps teams to more rapidly respond to vulnerabilities, correct issues, and maintain version standards across fragmented systems.

Detection and rapid response to vulnerabilities is a common challenge. Continuous security monitoring helps identify vulnerabilities across all component versions. The ability to respond quickly to security threats is essential. 

DeployHub provides real-time monitoring and alerting, which enables teams to respond to incidents rapidly and minimize any potential damage of an attack.

4. DevOps Pipeline Integration

Adding continuous security monitoring to your CI/CD pipeline is essential to evolve your DevOps practice to a DevSecOps Platform. Your DevOps pipeline may provide static code scans that show vulnerabilities at a single point in time. Continuous security monitoring provides you with real-time vulnerability analysis after your software build. 

Continuous security monitoring allows for proactive threat hunting, showing where a vulnerability is running across all of your environments, applications, and components. These insights provide a comprehensive view of the security landscape, enabling better risk management, detection and rapid response to new threats found every day.