Glossary
This page provides a glossary of terminology with definitions for InsightCloudSec-specific terminology as well as some useful cloud-based terms.
Term | Definition |
|---|---|
API | Application program interface, a set of functions and procedures allowing the creation of applications that access the features or data of an operating system, application, or other service. |
Admin, Administrators | A User with the highest level of privileges or authorizations. Admins generally will retain all permissions to read/view, write/edit, delete, etc. |
Authentication Servers | External Active Directory/LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) servers for user authentication. |
Background Job | Background Jobs are worker processes that run on a schedule to keep InsightCloudSec current (e.g., harvesting Insights) and optimized (e.g., OrphanedResourceCleanup). Background Jobs are distinct from On-Demand jobs in that they are not run immediately. Resource harvest jobs, which can be accessed via the Cloud details section, can be thought of as specialized Background Jobs. |
Badges | An internal ID for clouds. Badges are similar to Tags (key/value pairs applied to individual resources) but applied to entire cloud accounts. |
Base Pack | An Insight pack used as the basis for creating a custom pack. |
Bot | Bot (short for "robot") is an automated program that executes user-defined actions on resources according to user-defined conditions. Bots comprise a scope (bounds for which resources the Bot acts upon), Query Filters (conditions upon which the Bot will act), and actions (what the Bot does). |
BotFactory | The InsightCloudSec feature where the user creates Bots, defining the bots’ scope, conditions, and actions. |
CI/CD | The combined practices of continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) for developing software in a sustainable way. |
Cloud, | A cloud, or cloud account, is an account for cloud services (storage, compute, etc.) from a cloud service provider (Cloud Provider or CSP), such as AWS, GCP, Azure. You can have multiple accounts ("clouds") from a single provider, or you can use multiple providers to create your overall cloud infrastructure. |
Compliance | Conformity with industry requirements and standards for cloud-related security, cost, and other controls. Compliance across multiple cloud providers is a major focus of InsightCloudSec. |
Compliance Pack | Compliance Packs (a type of Insight Pack) are collections of related Insights pertinent to a specific compliance standard. Compliance Packs may focus on security, costs, governance, or combinations of these across a variety of frameworks. Examples are NIST 800-53, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and PCI DSS. Compliance Packs are accessed from the Compliance Packs tab on the Insights main page. |
Compliance Scorecard | Visually summarizes cloud accounts’ adherence to specific rules or conditions of an Industry Standard, e.g., NIST 800-53 or ISO 27001. This summary is presented as a heat-map type visual; the Compliance Scorecard also provides guidance concerning actions to take on specific resources to mitigate failing issues. Check out more information - Compliance Scorecard. |
Consumers | Relative to EDH, a central account that ingests events from one or more Producers. See also Event-Driven Harvesting (AWS). |
Container Vulnerabilities (Container Vulnerability Assessment) | a vulnerability (CVE) associated with the InsightCloudSec feature that continuously assesses all container images specified in production workloads to detect installed packages with known vulnerabilities. |
Custom Pack | A Compliance Pack (a type of Insight Pack), customized for specific uses. Custom packs can be created from existing--or base--packs, and adding or removing specific Insights as desired. Custom Packs are found on the Custom Packs tab of the Insights main page. |
Data Collections | A collection of strings of data definitions that can be used (and reused) in creating and updating Filters, Insights, and Bots. |
Disabled Resource | A disabled resource is a resource that is not harvested. As such, InsightCloudSec will not surface permissions errors related to harvesting disabled resources. |
InsightCloudSec | InsightCloudSec is a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) platform that provides real time analysis and automated remediation across leading cloud and container technologies, including AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, and Kubernetes. |
Detection | See "Findings" or results. |
Domain Admin | A User with the highest level of privileges or authorizations. A Domain Admin can do everything in the tool. There are also read-only Domain Admins who are able to view all resource data among all InsightCloudSec organizations, yet as the name implies, they are not able to make changes to InsightCloudSec. See also Admin. |
Entitlements | Entitlements, or Permissions Entitlements, give domain users control over basic users' and organization admins' permissions to access certain parts of the tool. These entitlements are available for BotFactory, Tag Explorer, Insights, and Scheduled Events. The four possible permissions levels are "disabled", "viewer", "editor", and "admin". Entitlements are assigned independently to features, e.g., a basic user might be "disabled" for BotFactory but have "editor" permissions for Tag Explorer. |
Event-Driven Harvesting (EDH) | Event-driven harvesting (EDH) is a data collection mechanism where events are pushed to InsightCloudSec instead of being collected via polling. AWS EDH leverages CloudTrail and CloudWatch events for collection. |
Event-Driven Role | Relative to AWS EDH, event-driven roles are either Consumer or Producer. |
Exemption | A Resource Group that defines a collection of resources that are not evaluated against a specific Insight. For example, S3 buckets configured to host websites can be placed in a Resource Group called |
Failed Insight | An Insight that matched a scoped resource. In other words, a resource met the conditions of this Insight when a query was run. |
Finding | A "finding" is a single check against a resource. If the resource matches any Query Filter included in the Insight, it is counted as a "finding". A single resource may be valid for multiple checks and as a result, may have multiple "findings". |
GCP | Google Cloud Platform |
Harvesting | Harvesting describes how InsightCloudSec collects data from the cloud providers: |
Host Vulnerabilities (Host Vulnerability Assessment) | a host vulnerability or(Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs)) is a vulnerability detected on host instances across clouds accounts. |
Impacted Resource | A resource within the specified scope that matches a designated (searched-on) Insight. Impacted resources indicate violations on an Insight. |
Infrastructure | With respect to cloud computing, infrastructure refers to an enterprise's entire cloud-based or local collection of resources and services. This term is used synonymously with "cloud footprint". |
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) | IaC allow you to define infrastructure in the cloud by writing code. Rather than deploying or making changes to your infrastructure manually, users can take advantage of the features typically employed in a code development environment. |
Insight | An Insight describes a specific behavior, condition, or characteristic of a cloud resource. Insights are the checks—built on a combination of one or more filters and scopes—that are run on your infrastructure. They can be used to report on resources, or to instruct Bots as to which resources require actions. Some examples of common Insights include: |
InsightCloudSec | InsightCloudSec is a fully-integrated cloud-native security platform (CNSP) that enables organizations to drive cloud security forward through continuous security & compliance. |
Insight Pack | A collection of Insights, usually focused on the same type of issue, e.g., security, compliance, governance. |
Insight Severity | A user-defined designation for the severity of an Insight. Severity levels are Info, Low, Medium, High, Critical. |
Instance | Refers to a virtual server instance from a public or private cloud network. |
Integration | External systems with which InsightCloudSec is designed to interface for both inbound (data aggregation, data collection) and outbound (notifications, ticketing) actions. |
Job Backlog | The number of harvest jobs that are enqueued and waiting on a worker node to process. Job backlogs can rise and fall. For example, adding clouds will cause the job backlog to rise as the initial cloud harvests are scheduled. The number of harvest jobs feeding into the job backlog can be greatly influenced by the cloud harvesting strategy selected; more aggressive strategies lead to more jobs. |
Job Scheduler | The process responsible for scheduling jobs performed by the workers. The scheduler will schedule regular cadence jobs, such as harvesting as well as on-demand jobs. It maintains different priority queues to help surface high priority jobs. |
Kubernetes | A Google-based, portable, extensible open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services. |
MFA (2FA) | Multi-factor authentication (MFA)--also known as two-factor authentication (2FA or TFA)--enhances security by verifying a user's identity using multiple methods of authentication from independent categories of credentials. |
Org Admin | A User with the highest level of privileges or authorizations. Admins generally will retain all permissions to read/view, write/edit, delete, etc. An Org Admin can do everything operational in their organization in the tool. See also Admin and Domain Admin. |
Organization (Provider Organization) | In InsightCloudSec, organizations allow for complete isolation between cloud accounts, resources, and users on an installation. Cloud accounts and their resources can only belong to one Organization and cannot be modified or viewed from another Organization. |
Owners | Refers to Owners of resources. Can only be set by Admins. Ownership can be used to set scope on resource searches, making it easier for the user to focus on the resources they care about. |
Permissions (Permission Type) | The cloud provider-defined permissions granted to InsightCloudSec to enable harvesting resource information and allowing InsightCloudSec to take resource management actions. |
Plugin | An element of a software program that can be added to provide support for specific features or functionality. |
Policy (Policies) | Collections of permissions that provide InsightCloudSec user-defined access to connected accounts. Policies can range from Standard User Policy, containing read-only permissions, to a Power User Policy, allowing InsightCloudSec to execute user-defined actions within accounts. |
Producers | Relative to EDH, a Producer is an account that is configured to forward cloud events to another account. See for details. |
Provisioning | The allocation of a cloud provider's resources and services to a customer; such services include IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. In InsightCloudSec, "Provisioning" can also refer to the permission that a user has been given to acquire or add such services to their cloud account. |
Query Filter | A Query Filter is a feature within InsightCloudSec that specifies conditions in searching for and identifying matching resources. An example Query Filter: ‘Resource is not encrypted’. |
Region | A geographic location in which public cloud service providers' data centers reside. |
Resource | A virtual (cloud-hosted) service, utility, or function. Cloud accounts are made up of resources; while different providers use different names in referring to their specific offerings, InsightCloudSec uses normalized names throughout the tool for these resources. For example, AWS’ S3 Bucket, GCP’s Cloud Storage, Azure’s Blob Storage Container, and Alibaba’s Object Storage Bucket all refer to storage resources; InsightCloudSec refers to all of these resources as a Storage Container. |
Resource Groups | Collections of resources; can be used to apply granular permissions to a subset of a cloud footprint to improve visibility or to apply custom policy. |
Resource Type Categories | Categories of resources by type. InsightCloudSec uses five normalized categories: Compute, Containers, Storage, Network, and Identity & Management. |
Role (or User Role) | Roles are used to manage the permissions of basic users. They can be customized to permit read, manage, and delete privileges. They can be customized to view all resources or resources defined by Cloud account, Resource Group, or Badge. |
Scheduled Events | A job within Bot automation that is configured to run at a specified time (or times) with specified arguments. Within Bot automation these jobs are called scheduled events. |
Scope | Scopes define the domain (limits or bounds) on clouds and resource groups in searches, displays, and bot actions. |
TFA (also know as MFA) | Two-factor authentication (also 2FA or MFA) enhances security by verifying a user's identity using multiple methods of authentication from independent categories of credentials. |
Tag (Tag Explorer) | A key/value pair used for identifying and labelling resources. |
Threat Findings (Threats) | Threat Findings (feature) is a single view that collects all runtime threat detection findings from various sources. |
User | InsightCloudSec users are distinguished by type: Basic User, Domain Admin, or Organization Admin (Org Admin). Basic Users can be assigned various roles and permissions or privileges. These characteristics are established in the User Management portion of the tool. Org Admins have all privileges confined to a single InsightCloudSec organization. Domain Admins have all privileges across an entire InsightCloudSec instance. |
User Group | A list of users linked to a list of Roles. User Groups are leveraged in conjunction with Roles to grant permissions to Basic Users. |
Worker | A generic term for a process that does something other than serve web requests. It may process a queue, run scheduled jobs using process files, or any number of other support-type activities. It generally does not interface with users. |