What is cloud security monitoring?

Cloud security monitoring is the continuous collection, analysis, and alerting on security events across cloud infrastructure — including API calls, configuration changes, identity events, and network traffic in AWS, Azure, and GCP.

How do you monitor AWS for security threats?

AWS security monitoring uses CloudTrail (API activity), GuardDuty (threat detection), Security Hub (aggregation), and Config (configuration compliance). Logs should be centralized in a SIEM for correlation and alerting.

What is the best SIEM for cloud security monitoring?

Cloud-native SIEM platforms like ZonForge Sentinel, Microsoft Sentinel, and Google Chronicle are designed for cloud log ingestion at scale. ZonForge Sentinel adds AI-powered investigation to automatically triage cloud security alerts.

Cloud Security Monitoring: AWS, Azure & GCP Complete Guide

Cloud environments generate thousands of security-relevant events every hour. Knowing which ones matter — and monitoring them effectively across AWS, Azure, and GCP simultaneously — is one of the hardest challenges in modern security operations.

The Multi-Cloud Monitoring Challenge

Each major cloud provider has its own audit logging format, terminology, and coverage gaps. AWS uses CloudTrail for API activity, Azure uses Activity Logs, and GCP uses Cloud Audit Logs — all with different schemas, different retention policies, and different alert mechanisms. Building unified detection across all three is a significant engineering challenge.

What to Monitor in AWS

CloudTrail: All API calls — especially IAM changes, S3 bucket policy modifications, security group changes, and Lambda deployments
GuardDuty findings: AWS's native threat detection — EC2 communications with threat intel, credential exfiltration, unusual API patterns
S3 access logs: Data exfiltration attempts, unusual cross-account access, public access grants
IAM activity: New admin users, policy changes, access key creation, root account usage

What to Monitor in Azure

Azure Activity Log: Resource modifications, RBAC changes, resource deletions, ARM template deployments
Azure AD / Entra ID: Sign-in logs, conditional access policy changes, MFA events, guest access grants
Microsoft Defender alerts: High-severity security alerts from Azure's native detection
Azure Key Vault: Secret access, key rotation events, vault policy changes

What to Monitor in GCP

Cloud Audit Logs: Admin Activity and Data Access logs — IAM changes, service account key creation, firewall rule modifications
Cloud Security Command Center: Security findings, vulnerability assessments, misconfigurations
Google Workspace: If used alongside GCP, login events, Drive sharing, admin console changes

Building Unified Multi-Cloud Detection

The most effective approach is using an AI SOC platform that natively ingests all three providers' logs into a unified data model — enabling cross-cloud correlation that individual cloud-native tools can't provide. When an IAM user is created in AWS, a new admin account in Azure AD, and an unusual GCP service account key is generated in the same 30-minute window, that's a coordinated attack pattern that only cross-cloud correlation surfaces.