Welcome to the latest edition of the Modern Service Management for Office 365 blog series! In this article, we review monitoring tools and techniques to manage information security using audit data. These insights and best practices are brought to you by Carroll Moon, Senior Architect for Modern Service Management.
Part 1: Introducing Modern Service Management for Office 365
Part 2: Monitoring and Major Incident Management
Part 3: Audit and Bad-Guy-Detection
Part 4: Leveraging the Office 365 Service Communications API
Part 5: Evolving IT for Cloud Productivity Services
Part 6: IT Agility to Realize Full Cloud Value - Evergreen Management
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Monitoring: Audit and Bad-Guy-Detection
In the Monitoring and Major Incident Management post, we discussed how monitoring can mean many things. In that post, we focused on monitoring for availability and performance. In this post, we will focus on audit and bad-guy-detection.
The most important part of this discussion is the ManagementActivityAPI. That API was announced in April of 2015 here. The MSDN reference is here and the schema is here. For many IT Pros, using the API is something they do not have the current ability (of course, they could learn) or time to focus on. My goal here is to help simplify the discussion so everyone can start to get business benefit from the API.
What should you be looking for?
Before we get into the “how”, we should discuss the “why” and the “what”. The question that most readers will be asking is “why should I care”? The answer to that question is “it comes down to scenarios”. Would it help you with audit and compliance requirements to be able to provide a report for “which admins gave themselves permissions to another user’s mailbox” last month? Would it help you with security monitoring to alert on the condition of “if an account has X failed login attempts in Y minutes”? Would it be helpful to your Service Desk’s goal of becoming more proactive to have a report of all users who got “access denied” for SharePoint files so the Service Desk can go proactively train them?
There are countless scenarios that can be enabled by this data. I encourage you to spend time talking to your compliance, security, audit and Service Desk teams to brainstorm how this data can help them be more successful in reaching their goals. Once you land on a couple of scenarios (the “why” and “what”), then it will be more fun to talk about the “how”.
We have the API, now what?
I have included the links to the API’s reference and schema above, but what does that mean? To use the API, one needs to think of the data flow in steps:
Surely, there is an easier way...
There are starter solutions for what I’ve described above. Many 3rd parties have built solutions that pull from the API and start to quantify patterns, reports, and alerts that most enterprise customers will care about. See this announcement for a list of some of the 3rd parties who have done work in this area.
But what about a first-party solution from Microsoft?
There is a feature in Azure called Operations Management Suite (OMS). Within OMS, there is a feature called Log Analytics. Note that as of this writing, the introductory level of Log Analytics is free as described here.
On top of OMS Log Analytics, Microsoft has published a public preview of a solution to do steps 1-4 for our enterprise customers. You can learn more about that solution pack here.
Side Note: I encourage everyone to think of OMS Log Analytics not as a “new tool”, but as a feature in Azure that can be leveraged to enable scenarios. Just like Azure Machine Learning allows you to take advantage of ML capabilities without building your own, proprietary ML platform, OMS Log Analytics allows your business to take advantage of “big-data-monitoring” with minimal overhead. You just turn the feature on, and you pay only as you choose to store more information. It is a great new paradigm.
Wrapping it up
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