By Charles Comiskey Marisa-Luisa Lopez de Silanes Ruiz Andrew Low 3 min read
August 13, 2021

IBM Cloud Activity Tracker is now part of the IBM Cloud for Financial Services.

IBM Cloud Activity Tracker events may be directly routed to customer-managed IBM Cloud Object Storage. Events routed to object storage comply with IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services controls. The event-routing feature is available in the Dallas (US-South) and Washington DC (US-East) multi-zone regions (MZRs).

The IBM Cloud for Financial Services is a financial services-ready cloud platform. It is designed to build trust and enable a transparent public cloud ecosystem with the defined operational criteria and compliance controls needed by the financial services industry. Defined areas include security, data privacy, access management, configuration management and resiliency. 

Common operational criteria and streamlined compliance controls simplify building new applications and migrating existing workloads to IBM Cloud. It was recently announced that IBM Cloud reached a milestone with 100+ Ecosystem Partners, helping customers accelerate cloud adoption and digital transformation throughout the financial service industry.

The value of IBM Cloud Activity Tracker events

IBM Cloud Activity Tracker captures a record of your IBM Cloud activities. The activity events are records of actions your users and applications made to services on IBM Cloud. Events include service provision, configuration, access management and security-related actions. A comprehensive list of cloud services and the events generated is available here.  

  • IBM Cloud Activity Tracker events increase your visibility to IBM Cloud configuration changes so you may more effectively manage the risk of incorrectly configured services.
  • Activity events simplify your understanding of IT complexity and agile development actions in the cloud. The combination of events provides a holistic view of what happened.
  • Insights from the event data help accelerate identification of abnormal activity. For example, track the frequency and volume of access management events or multi-factor authentication configuration changes.

Activity event data is a record to maintain an audit trail for compliance. Collected events comply with the Cloud Auditing Data Federation (CADF) standard.

Configuring event routing

IBM Cloud accounts that are required to maintain Financial Services Validation status can be configured via an API, CLI or Terraform to route activity event data directly to IBM Cloud Object Storage. Data routed directly to your IBM Cloud Object Storage enables you to store and manage the data to your specified requirements. Data can then be shared with your existing tooling for insights.   

Check out the “Getting started with Activity Tracker event routing” documentation for the steps to take to configure your account. Accounts configured for this feature will send supporting activity events exclusively to your defined and managed Cloud Object Storage location. 

Hosted event search for non-Financial Services Validation needs 

The new event routing feature broadens the use cases where IBM Cloud Activity Tracker can be used. However, many workloads on IBM Cloud do not require Financial Services Validation and are encouraged to alternatively select one of the hosted event search plans from the catalog tile. Hosted event search plans provide a fast and easy way for you search and alert on your data. Hosted event search is compliant with PCI, SOC2 Type 2 and HIPAA.

Increase your IBM Cloud activity awareness today

IBM Cloud Activity Tracker enables accelerated detection and troubleshooting of issues while also providing an audit trail for security and compliance. Learn more about the IBM Cloud Activity Tracker service and select a configuration that best meets your needs.

Categories

Cloud  |  management  |  Security  |  storage  | 
Charles Comiskey
Product Manager
Marisa-Luisa Lopez de Silanes Ruiz
Signature Experience
Andrew Low
Senior Technical Staff Member

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