Having an incident response framework in place means you can avoid costly mistakes. It also saves time by automating IR where possible. Modern IT environments use multiple cloud service providers, technologies and platforms. These are different from the traditional on-prem environments that incident responders work with, requiring more agility from a team of CIR specialists.
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Enhanced Security
As organizations accelerate cloud transformation, they must ensure their teams are prepared to catch and respond to incidents quickly. A cloud incident response framework can help. It ingests alerts from all your applications and infrastructure to automatically route them to the right experts based on escalation processes, on-call schedules, and routing rules. It also reduces the volume of alerts that require human attention, allowing team members to focus on what matters most. The result is a more efficient workflow and reduced costs. Finally, it provides a consistent approach to incident detection and resolution across all environments. This is critical, as many companies now house digital services on multiple cloud platforms for greater agility and scalability.
Automated Response
Many modern business systems operate partially or fully within cloud environments consisting of storage, networks, management software and virtualization. These environments are complex and often supplied by more than one service provider. Cloud incident response (IR) is the process of addressing incidents in these rapidly changing environments. Traditional IR methods have slowly adapted to today’s ever-changing threat landscape and dynamic systems. Cloud environments require monitoring of APIs, applications and user roles in addition to established detective controls and tools. This needs teams to be agile and familiar with the details of each platform, service and application.
The right cloud IR playbook saves businesses time and money by promptly ensuring teams are notified of potential issues. Notifications can also be sent to key on-call team members to allow them to focus their efforts immediately. Adding architecture diagrams to your workflows can help teams communicate and quickly identify issues.
Increased Visibility
Regarding the cloud, IR teams must consider new infrastructure and investigative challenges different from traditional on-prem environments. For instance, the dynamic nature of cloud systems and data access requires that IR stakeholders be familiar with cloud platforms and services to effectively prevent, detect and respond to incidents. Without proper visibility and accessibility, a business may experience significant interruptions or lose critical data during an incident. As a result, organizations must plan for incident response in the cloud before they need it. This includes the planning, preparing and implementing tools, controls, policies and playbooks that provide deep visibility into cloud environments to help teams identify and respond to threats quickly and efficiently. Companies must also understand the shared responsibility model employed by CSPs and plan accordingly for how to work with them during an incident. This includes ensuring that IR team members complete training with their CSPs and are familiar with the types of services, objects, APIs, commands and other cloud-centric concepts required to build a robust incident response function in the cloud.
Enhanced Communication
Modern business systems operate in cloud environments that contain networks, storage, virtualization, management software and more. These environments can include multiple different clouds, regions and instances. This enables a dynamic and flexible architecture and exposes the company to increased risk and attack surfaces. A well-defined IR framework focuses on the incident response for these unique environments, which can save businesses time and money from expensive downtime and data exposure. When a breach occurs, IT teams need visibility and access to alerting, logging and monitoring tools for all the components in their cloud environment. They can quickly identify and resolve the issue’s source with the right tool. In addition, incident response teams need a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities to minimize confusion and avoid mistakes during an event. This may involve establishing playbooks, communication scripts and other processes to ensure all team members are on the same page during a crisis. This can be especially important when dealing with large and distributed teams. In addition, it is critical to understand the role of cloud service providers during an event.
Faster Remediation
Using a cloud incident response framework, remediation times can be drastically reduced. Using a platform like Insights to discover vulnerabilities across your fleet of systems, you can quickly remediate them and minimize the risk with minimal friction. Learning and fixing vulnerabilities with Insights is 91% faster than manually scripting. As a result, you can save your business time and money by cutting down on remediation times. To do so, ensure that teams are properly prepared and trained to respond to incidents in the cloud. This includes familiarizing them with the CSP responsibilities model and how to work together toward achieving security objectives. For example, it’s crucial to establish least privilege accounts for response team members and enable cross-account access with multifactor authentication. Also, plan for logging and storage capabilities, such as write-once storage, so that valuable forensic artifacts are not lost in the event of an incident. Additionally, ensure teams understand the cloud architecture and how various components interact. This will help them understand the impact of a disruption or a vulnerability on other services.
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