How Organizations Are Addressing Cloud Investigation and Response

As organizations increasingly migrate to the cloud, they face a complex landscape of new threats and regulatory pressures. To effectively investigate and respond to incidents in cloud environments, companies must adapt their strategies and tools. Our recent survey highlights how organizations are recognizing gaps in their cloud security, feeling the heat from regulators, and making significant investments to bolster their cloud investigation capabilities. This post explores the current approaches and strategies organizations are employing to enhance their cloud incident response.

Recognizing the Gap and Regulatory Pressure

Traditional IR Can’t Keep Up:
Organizations are becoming acutely aware of the shortcomings of traditional incident response methods when it comes to cloud environments. The unique characteristics of cloud infrastructure, such as its dynamic nature, scale, and the use of multiple platforms, need a new approach. 

Increased Regulatory Scrutiny:
With the rise of data privacy regulations and incident reporting mandates worldwide, organizations face heightened scrutiny. Noncompliance can lead to severe penalties, making it crucial to have robust cloud investigation and response mechanisms in place. 74% of organizations surveyed reported that data privacy regulations complicate incident response, underscoring the urgency to adapt to regulatory requirements.

Realizing the Need for Enhanced Cloud Capabilities:
A majority of organizations surveyed (89%) acknowledge that they suffer damage before they can fully contain and investigate incidents, particularly in cloud environments.

Enhancing Cloud Investigation and Response

To address these challenges, organizations are actively growing their capabilities to perform investigations in the cloud. Key steps include:

1. Allocating and Increasing Budgets: Recognizing the importance of cloud-specific investigation tools, many organizations have started to allocate dedicated budgets for cloud forensics. 83% of organizations have budgeted for cloud forensics, with 77% expecting this budget to increase in 2024. This reflects a strong commitment to improving cloud security.
   
   
2. Implementing Advanced Technologies:

Automation: Incident response automation has proven to be highly effective in managing cloud threats. Automation helps streamline processes, reduce manual effort, and accelerate response times.  Automation is reported to be twice as effective as traditional SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) platforms for cloud threat investigations.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI is increasingly being recognized for its potential to revolutionize cloud incident response. AI can help in quickly analyzing vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, and providing actionable insights. 95% of organizations believe that AI will play a major role in cloud incident response within the next two years.

Strategies for Effective Cloud Investigation and Response

Organizations are also exploring various strategies to optimize their cloud investigation and response capabilities:

Enhancing Visibility and Control:

Unified Platforms: Implementing platforms that provide a unified view across multiple cloud environments can help organizations achieve better visibility and control. This consolidation reduces the complexity of managing disparate tools and data sources.

Improved Integration: Ensuring that all security tools and platforms are seamlessly integrated is critical. This integration facilitates better data sharing and cohesive incident management.

CloudSpecific Expertise: Training and Recruitment: Investing in training programs to develop cloud-specific skills among existing staff and recruiting experts with cloud security knowledge can bridge the skill gap.

Continuous Learning: Given the constantly evolving nature of cloud threats, continuous learning and adaptation are essential for maintaining effective security measures.

Leveraging Automation and AI:

Automation Solutions: Automation solutions for cloud environments can significantly speed up and simplify incident response efficiency. These solutions can handle repetitive tasks, allowing security teams to focus on more complex issues.

AIPowered Analysis: AI can assist in rapidly analyzing incident data, identifying anomalies, and predicting potential threats. This proactive approach can help prevent incidents before they escalate.

Cloud Investigation and Response with Cado

The Cado platform helps organizations address the complexities of cloud investigations and incident response with ease. The platform seamlessly integrates with AWS, GCP, and Azure, consolidating data from multiple cloud environments into one unified platform. This integration enhances visibility and control, making it easier to manage and respond to incidents across diverse cloud infrastructures.

Leveraging machine learning and automation, the Cado platform accelerates the investigation process by quickly analyzing vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, and providing actionable insights. Automation reduces manual effort and response times, allowing your security team to focus on the most pressing issues.

The Cado platform can help you stay ahead of threats whilst also meeting regulatory requirements, helping you to maintain a robust cloud security position.

Do you want to see what capability Cado can bring to your Cloud environment? Schedule a demo with 

one of our team.