We’re taking another step forward in our mission to help you achieve continuous security and compliance.
Our customers have been requesting a consistent way to manage multiple notification channels across all of our capabilities in IBM Cloud® Security and Compliance Center. We listened and are happy to make a couple of announcements today.
First, there is a new service that you can now provision from the IBM Cloud catalog called IBM Cloud® Event Notifications. This service allows you to manage your business more smoothly by providing notification routing channels — such as webhooks, email and SMS* — that are necessary for you to get the right notification to the right receiver using the right channel.
Second, we integrated Event Notifications into the Security and Compliance Center user experience so that you can manage and route all of your Security and Compliance Center alerts from a single dashboard. With a fast alert time, you’re able to immediately start an investigation into any reported issue and fix the vulnerability before it becomes a larger problem in your application.
What is IBM Cloud Event Notifications?
IBM Cloud Event Notifications is an event notification routing service that notifies you about critical events that occur in your IBM Cloud account. You can filter and route event notifications from IBM Cloud services — such as Security and Compliance Center — to various communication channels, including email and SMS. Additionally, if you need to integrate events into your application logic, you can forward event notifications to webhooks in order to trigger actions in your apps and services.
For more information about Event Notifications, check out the IBM Cloud documentation.
How does it work?
When an event of interest takes place in the Security and Compliance Center, the service communicates with Event Notifications to forward an alert to a supported destination, such as a flexible webhook, an email or an SMS.
Security and Compliance Center aggregates a list of your pending notifications by event type. The service checks for and dispatches any pending notifications to the connected Event Notifications service as they occur in the system. For example, you might receive notifications from a Security and Compliance Center source that are similar to the following messages:
- A validation scan of your resources was completed.
- A new resource was found in your inventory.
- Control failures exceeded the threshold limit.
- A Security Insights finding was reported for your account.
How do I get started?
If you’re already using the Security and Compliance Center to monitor your current posture, verify that you have the required permissions to view and manage your settings. Then, you can use the Global settings > Event Notifications section in the Security and Compliance Center UI to connect to an Event Notifications service instance in your account.
- Connect the Security and Compliance Center with Event Notifications:
- Create topics and subscriptions in your Event Notifications instance.
- Verify your connection by sending a test notification.
To learn more about this integration, check out Enabling event notifications for Security and Compliance Center.
Feedback
In order to ensure that we are helping you to deliver on your own mission, we’d like to hear from you with any feedback that you might have. To share your questions with us, you can open a GitHub issue from a link at the top of any page in the documentation, open a ticket with IBM Cloud Support or reach out directly through email.
*Note: Notifications for Security and Compliance Center were previously known as alerts. As of 10 December 2021, the alerts capability is deprecated in favor of Event Notifications. After this date, new alerts can’t be created. You can continue to view or delete existing alerts until 15 March 2022. To access information about the deprecated feature, you can view the IBM Cloud documentation. Currently the Event Notifications service supports SMS for United States and Canada while quickly expanding to many other markets and countries in 2022.