The cloud provides scalability, flexibility, and cost advantages. However, these benefits can be complicated by a need for more visibility and tools in the event of an incident.
Consider incident response requirements when building your cloud environments. Ensure that your teams have the proper logging and monitoring capabilities to identify, respond to, and recover from incidents quickly.
Increased visibility
Detecting incidents requires robust data collection and accessibility. But when it comes to the cloud, this can be costly. Since most cloud costs are tied to data usage, in-depth network activity logging can significantly raise an organization’s monthly bills. And without this logging, businesses risk missing critical alerts.
To overcome this, organizations should train their teams to detect and respond to threats in the cloud. This should include educating DevOps and architecture teams on cloud incident response requirements as they set up their environments.
Additionally, they should prioritize and implement alerting use cases that bring real-time visibility into anomalous events across their cloud platforms and services. This can help security operations teams identify and act upon potential attacks as they occur, such as excessive login failures to an administrative API or the deployment of unauthorized servers and services. Ultimately, this increased visibility can allow security teams to quickly identify and respond to cloud-specific threats while minimizing production disruption. This will also enable them to improve their forensics capabilities by using historical data to pinpoint trends and patterns.
Faster response
While detecting security incidents in the cloud is not easy, effective cloud incident response management can reduce the time it takes to identify, contain, and recover from a threat. However, this requires pre-work and specialized tools. It also involves a strong collaboration between IT, security, and DevSecOps teams that can support their incident response processes with automation and an optimized approach for each investigation phase.
Unlike on-premises environments, many events in the cloud are not logged, and there needs to be more granular visibility into underlying architectures and identities. This leads to blind spots that attackers can exploit for reconnaissance and attack.
In addition, identifying and containing vulnerabilities in the cloud can be more complex because attacks typically require logical access to infrastructure components, including digital identities and credentials. To overcome these challenges, working closely with vendors and understanding their responsibilities in a shared responsibility model is essential. Keeping their team in the loop by building relationships and establishing critical contact points will help them save valuable time during an incident.
Increased security
IR teams are left with blindspots in the cloud, as many organizations refrain from enabling extensive log collection for cost reasons. Without granular visibility, it is difficult to understand data and actions at the cloud level, so teams cannot effectively detect or respond to threats.
Having cloud-specific IR processes and tools can help to close these gaps. Ensure your team can quickly identify and analyze events and conduct short-term and long-term containment, eradication, and recovery. To reduce time to detection, set up a centralized cloud repository for all your logs and evidence (including snapshots). Use tags and metadata to maintain visibility and connect these with organizational units, projects, or systems.
Establishing collaborative relationships across enterprise teams is another critical component of effective incident response. Consider involving your cloud architecture, security, and DevOps teams in incident response planning. Doing so can close the gap between days to alerts and seconds to the response. Also, invest in cloud-centric training for your team to familiarize them with the types of services, objects, APIs, and commands used on the cloud.
Reduced costs
Using cloud infrastructure to house business data creates unique security challenges. Attackers often find ways to penetrate defenses and gain access to a company’s data in the cloud via brute force password guessing, account compromise, or insider threats.
When it comes to detecting these threats, visibility is the key. However, many cloud environments do not proactively log activities like on-premises networks. As a result, attackers can hide from incident responders by masking activity and reducing the amount of available data for investigation.
Adding a layer of visibility for cloud-specific events like application and API logging can reduce business costs by eliminating some of the cost-inducing barriers many organizations face when trying to leverage existing tools and platforms to detect and respond to threats in their clouds. Incorporating cloud-specific incident response skills into your team can also help reduce the time needed to detect, respond, and recover from an incident from months or even days to hours. This is particularly important for organizations operating at warp speed to meet their business objectives.
Increased flexibility
Cloud IR is more flexible than traditional IR, requiring complex tools and processes to manage data, networks, and infrastructure. As such, organizations can expect to see a reduction in incident response timelines from months to days or even minutes.
In addition, planning for a more collaborative approach to detecting and responding to incidents in the cloud is essential. This means building a culture of collaboration across teams that may not traditionally work together (such as security and the DevOps team). By addressing this gap, it’s possible to reduce risk by minimizing production disruption.
As a best practice, ensuring the security team is ready for an incident in the cloud is essential by creating most minor privilege accounts and enabling multifactor authentication. Doing this will make it easier for the security team to quickly gain access to the environment and perform an investigation in the event of a security incident. Additionally, it’s a good idea to implement write-once storage for logs and evidence in the cloud to ensure they can be recovered during an attack.