The move to cloud computing has provided scalability, accessibility and automation to development teams, allowing them to implement new solutions at cloud-speed. However, cyber security has struggled to keep pace with the rapid speed of cloud adoption and the increase in cloud-based threats. Cloud Investigation and Response Automation (CIRA) aims to help organizations close existing gaps in their cloud security program with the ability to efficiently investigate and respond to potential incidents.
There’s a Cloud Investigation and Response Gap
Over the past few years, security teams have focused on adopting cloud prevention and detection technologies such as Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP). These solutions are absolutely essential and important. However, once something bad has been detected, organizations often still struggle to get to the bottom of what happened with the visibility these solutions provide.
Response Plans are Stuck in the Past
With a need to gain visibility beyond what a cloud detection solution can provide, security teams have had little choice but to apply legacy forensics tools to support cloud investigations. However, these solutions were simply not built for dynamic cloud environments, and there are many use cases where these approaches fall short. Further, doing investigations using legacy tools still require significant manual effort, with, 64% of organizations saying it takes too much time to collect and process data to perform a timely investigation (on average, it takes organizations 3.1 days to begin an investigation). Security analysts are still required to manually request access to the cloud resource(s) they need to investigate, which can take days. This can lead to negative outcomes in the window between detection and remediation which is what is experienced by 89% of organizations. From there, the investigation itself is also manual, and security teams often resort to spreadsheets to meticulously piece everything together, all whilst the hacker is still running around potentially exfiltrating data. There is also the challenge of ephemeral resources such as containers. These resources spin up and down continuously and if you’re not quick to capture the data, it’s gone forever. Incorporating automation into the cloud incident response journey is essential to reducing the amount of time, resources and money that’s required to truly understand the root cause, scope and impact of an incident.
Bridging the Detection and Response Galp With CIRA
CIRA technologies aim to both fill the tooling gap faced by security teams and free up precious time from labor intensive and repetitive tasks so that analysts can focus their time on critical and urgent investigations. CIRA platforms achieve this by automating evidence collection, investigation, and remediation, as well delivering greater depth in terms of visibility that’s provided into cloud infrastructure. Further, with automation at the core of the solution's offering, security teams can feel confident that critical evidence in ephemeral environments is automatically preserved at the time of detection, ensuring that it will be there if / when the Security Operations Center (SOC) and Digital Forensics & Incident Response (DFIR) teams need to perform a deeper dive investigation.
How Cado can Help
Cado is a CIRA platform that aims to automate as much of the incident response as possible, from data capture to root cause analysis. This 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 full disk, cloud-provider logs and memory, it drastically speeds up investigations. Cado empowers security analysts by highlighting key incident details and supports quick attack containment.
Interested in learning more? Contact our team to see a demo.
Cloud Investigations
