Why Cloud Incident Response Frameworks Are Critical for Data Protection

An incident response framework helps to guide teams through the preparation, investigation, and recovery phases. This includes implementing tooling and controls, staff training, and creating incident response policies and playbooks. It also means ensuring cloud security tools can monitor and detect activity in your cloud environments and subscriptions. This is critical as attackers leverage techniques such as multifactor authentication bombing and pinging to remain undetected in your environment.

Deeper Visibility into Your Cloud Environment

Many modern business systems are built on a complex combination of cloud infrastructure, platforms, and services. This translates into massive data, often stored in multiple locations. For security experts to monitor the environment effectively, they need to be able to gain visibility into the various components of the system – from networks, storage, and virtualization to management software. Using a cloud incident response framework, you can ensure a complete picture of your infrastructure is available to your team and identify vulnerabilities as they emerge. You can also streamline notification, assessment, and implementation of workarounds to mitigate the impact of incidents and enable faster recovery from attack and compromise.

Another key advantage of using a cloud incident response framework is setting appropriate response priorities based on alert severity and asset sensitivity. This helps your team focus on the highest-impact events first, ensuring critical assets remain operational during an incident.

In addition, the framework helps you identify what information to share with stakeholders and how to communicate with them during an incident. This is particularly important for regulated sectors, which require timely reporting to regulators in the event of an incident.

Unlike traditional incident response, which relied on standard operating procedures and established detective controls, a cloud incident response framework requires agility and knowledge of the specifics of your cloud environment. This information can help you quickly detect anomalous activities and identify the root cause, minimizing the damage to your organization’s operations and ensuring swift restoration of your systems after an incident.

Streamlined Response

A cloud incident response framework should help organizations to define a standardized approach to detection, alerting, investigation, forensics, and remediation. This helps to reduce the mean time to detect and mean time to respond (MTTD and MTTR), which are often exacerbated by the manual processes that security teams must follow.

In addition, a cloud incident response framework should help clarify responsibilities for addressing incidents, especially concerning the division of duties between your organization and your CSPs. It should also allow for identifying underlying issues contributing to an incident, such as misconfigurations in your infrastructure or a lack of visibility into your data, programs, and systems.

An excellent way to ensure a standardized approach to cloud incident response is to use a unified management platform that provides centralized visibility and control over your entire enterprise environment. This enables you to detect and resolve incidents quickly and allows for implementing automated tools that can help prevent future incidents.

Another critical step is to identify adversarial tactics, techniques, and procedures, a common root cause of cyberattacks in the cloud. An open-source repository can be helpful for this purpose, as it can help you to understand the attack surface of your infrastructure, including third-party services and CI/CD pipelines.

Reduced Risk

Whether a threat actor exploits an existing vulnerability in cloud software or builds a new toolkit to target it, attackers need visibility into your cloud environment. Without robust logging, they can use techniques such as MFA bombing to flood accounts with authentication prompts and count on user error or fatigue to gain access.

Unlike traditional IT systems, cloud environments house massive amounts of dynamic data that require specialized tools and processes to detect and respond to incidents. This creates significant challenges for incident response teams needing more training, tools, and knowledge to handle a cloud-centric threat landscape.

Effective IR requires the ability to quickly and thoroughly evaluate the impact of a threat, identify what constitutes an incident, and take action in four phases: containment, eradication, and recovery. This includes preventing the incident from spreading and reducing its impact by containing and quarantining assets that are acting suspiciously or maliciously; eradicating the threat by removing a compromised account, infected application, container image or runtime, or other evidence from your systems; and restoring normal operations with minimal disruption to the organization. Stakeholders also must work together to establish a common understanding of responsibilities when responding to an incident, including how information is shared with affected individuals and government authorities. Ambiguity over information sharing can lead to a fragmented response by stakeholders, resulting in slower remediation and more significant business impact.

Improved Compliance

Regardless of the type of incident, a framework must include standard procedures for response and recovery. Clear communication and timelines for testing and implementation can speed healing and ensure fully functional systems.

Additionally, a framework must account for exploiting nonmalicious triggers of digital failure, including human errors and technical failures, supply chain disruptions, and natural disasters. These incidents can impact multiple cloud providers and their customers, resulting in a widespread outage or even business interruption.

The complexity of the cloud environment increases the need for specialized IR teams that can handle dynamic, highly distributed, and rapidly evolving threats. Unlike traditional on-prem systems, which housed static data and were easily accessible, cloud environments are more passionate. They can produce massive volumes of logs that must be stored and accessed for investigation. Access to specialized IR tools and processes can help organizations respond to incidents quickly and efficiently. A sound cloud IR strategy must also include a plan to identify, track and share evidence artifacts. This requires monitoring the cloud for potential precursor events, following cloud service vulnerabilities, and determining what can be done to protect critical systems from attack. It’s also important to consider the need for automation and a “playbook” approach to incoming alerts. This allows for rapid, automated if-then actions triggered by security alerts and enables teams to capture, archive, and analyze logs.