The movement of workloads to the cloud is unstoppable. But, this movement means that you have to monitor more workloads than ever to ensure that they’re safe for external and internal users. According to Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report 2020, 92% of organizations have a cloud security readiness gap, and 59% of them have had privileged cloud credentials phished.

Oracle Cloud Guard is an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service that helps customers monitor, identify, achieve, and maintain a strong security posture on Oracle Cloud. It helps you examine cloud resources, detects security risks related to configuration, and suggests corrective actions. And it can integrate with Cloud Events to proactively notify you when risks are detected. Cloud Guard is a cloud native service that comes free with Oracle Cloud.

Detect security risks automatically

In Cloud Guard, you define targets, which represent the scope of what Cloud Guard checks. Cloud Guard uses detectors to identify potential security problems based on activities or configurations. You can further specify responders, which represent the actions that Cloud Guard can take to remediate problems.

To proactively inform cloud administrators when a new risk is detected, integrate Cloud Guard with Cloud Events to send email notifications.

Integrate Cloud Events for email notification

To integrate Cloud Guard with Cloud Events, navigate to Observability & Management > Event Services > Rules in the Oracle Cloud Console.

Create a rule by defining the rule conditions. Select Cloud Guard as the service name, and choose the event type that you want to be notified about. The following example shows a rule that matches when a new problem is detected in the specified compartment.

Next, select Notification as the action type, and select the email notification channel to define the target email addresses. When Cloud Guard finds an issue, it registers a new problem, and that sends an email notification as defined here.

This approach will save you time and effort when monitoring cloud security, and give you peace of mind when running workloads on Oracle Cloud.