Multi-cloud environments are gaining in popularity, with 87% of organizations adopting multi-cloud infrastructure. There are numerous reasons for organizations to do this: to maintain SLAs and protect against outage, capitalize on regional coverage, manage costs, or to simply maximise functionality. With cloud security teams already struggling to get the data they need when working with only one cloud platform, multi-cloud exacerbates this issue. In a multi-cloud world, security experts are required to possess intricate knowledge of multiple CSPs to be able to respond effectively, which can be feel nearly impossible on top of everything else they already have on their plate.
Regulations Drive Multi-Cloud Adoption
It's important to note that there are a growing number of new regulations that further highlight the benefits of moving to a multi-cloud approach. The United States Financial Industry Regulatory (FINRA) has stated that broker-dealers should be able to switch cloud providers when needed and “consider the risks associated with vendor lock-in.”, including “an exit strategy to mitigate against an unfavorable lock-in scenario”. The European Banking Authority has also warned against the risk management associated with one provider, urging its members to take “concentration risk” into account by avoiding a “dominant service provider that is not easily substitutable.”
Multi-Cloud and its Impact on Incident Response
When it comes to incident response, having your data live across multiple clouds can make getting to the bottom of what happened a daunting task. While security teams already struggle to get the data they need to perform incident response in the cloud, the rise of multi-cloud makes this task even more challenging for a few major reasons:
- Data silos - Each cloud provider has their own terminology, security tools, monitoring logs, and APIs, making it difficult to know which data sources are most valuable to capture, how to capture them, and moreover, how to efficiently investigate all of these different sources.
- Skill & knowledge gaps - It's already painfully difficult to hire cyber security professionals with deep cloud knowledge, but finding security talent that has the skill set to work in multiple clouds can feel close to impossible.
How CIRA Helps Organizations Embrace a Multi-Cloud Strategy
CIRA (Cloud Investigation and Response Automation) technologies enable security teams to streamline investigations of incidents in multi-cloud environments. CIRA platforms like Cado work to combat the challenges associated with responding to incidents in multi-cloud environments, drastically simplifying the process of capturing, processes and analyzing data acquired from hundreds of different sources. Cross-cloud support is now an essential feature to consider when implementing a strategy for cloud security and incident response. It is essential for security analysts to have the ability to seamlessly investigate incidents identified in AWS, Azure and GCP in a single pane of glass.
This cross-cloud visibility gives security teams the comprehensive coverage they need to adequately manage risk in their environment. As CIRA platforms automate the gathering of evidence across all cloud providers and services in the environment, security teams don't have to possess extensive knowledge of each cloud provider to gather the data they need. Instead, this is it's available for them to view easily in the CIRA platform, and even better, in a single timeline. CIRA technologies also offer the ability to automatically remediate and contain threats as well.
How Cado can Help
Cado is a CIRA platform that aims to automate as much of the incident response process as possible, from data capture to root cause analysis and response. The Cado platform offers rapid access to detailed forensic data in various environments like multi-cloud, containers, and serverless setups. By processing evidence in parallel from sources such as logs, full disk and memory, it drastically speeds up investigations. Further, Cado empowers security analysts of all levels by highlighting key incident details and supports quick attack containment.
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