Cloud Incident Response Blog | Cado Security

Developers and Attackers are There, You Need to be There too!

Written by jbowen@cadosecurity.com | Jan 24, 2023 4:31:58 PM

If we consider the main reasons why organizations moved to cloud in the first place, it’s because of the speed, agility and automation it offers. However, cloud security has not followed suit and securing the cloud often means organizations lose those benefits. The fact is that adequately managing cloud security still requires significant manual effort. While innovation in detection solutions means organizations quickly know when malicious activity is happening, once something bad has been identified, things start to dramatically slow down.

When a cyber incident occurs in the cloud today, security teams face a lose-lose decision:

  • Close an incident without digging deeper, leaving risk on the table
  • Rely on traditional tools, open source platforms and spreadsheets to stitch together an investigation 

Organizations Recognize the Need for a New Approach to Cloud Forensics & Incident Response

Given how essential the cloud has become to business, traditional investigation tools have promised to extend to the cloud, but there are still major limitations. These tools were not built for dynamic cloud, container-based and serverless environments. According to a survey by ESG, 79% of organizations realize the need for a new set of technologies for forensics and incident response in cloud environments. The main challenges respondents noted include: lack of visibility and depth, the tedious nature of traditional forensics and incident response and the increase in usage of ephemeral resources (containers)1

Automation: The Key To Modern Incident Response

Incorporating automation into the cloud incident response journey is essential to reducing the amount of time, resources and money that’s required to understand the root cause, scope and impact of an incident. With the amount of data that sits in the cloud today, organizations require the ability to automatically capture and process forensic data at cloud speed and scale. Security teams shouldn’t have to worry about working across multiple cloud teams, access requirements, or the fact that their investigation spans multiple cloud platforms, systems and regions. While all of these complexities often makes incident response feel nearly impossible, automation flips the script.  

At Cado, we Believe the Cloud Makes Security Easier, not Harder

By leveraging the speed, scale and automation of the cloud security teams can: 

  • Reduce MTTR: Traditional approaches were not developed for the cloud – as is apparent with every step of the process, from data collection to investigation and response. By ruthlessly automating where we can, security teams can apply cloud speed to the end-to-end incident response process, drastically reducing the time it takes to investigate and respond to cloud incidents. 

  • Close the Skills Gap: Security teams shouldn’t have to be cloud experts to secure their environment. By automating common investigative tasks, analysts of all levels can perform thorough forensic analysis and incident response in cloud, container and serverless environments.

  • Better Understand Risk: Gaining forensic-level detail in the cloud may seem like a daunting task (and multi-cloud further complicates matters). But with automation, security teams can effortlessly dive deep - no matter where the data resides. With visibility beyond what a traditional detection system can provide, organizations can better manage risk across the most complex cloud environments. 

Check out our latest white paper that covers five reasons why you need Cloud Investigation and Response Automation to ensure your organization can efficiently understand and respond to threats in the cloud.

ESG, 2021, Report: Organizations Demand a New Approach to Digital Forensics