Best Practices For Cloud Incident Response
The cloud incident response process, or cloud incident management, is how the cloud is managed and secured against cyber attacks. An organization’s ability to manage and secure the cloud shows its reliability. Cloud technology is used almost universally for storing data and sharing resources. Using a cloud environment allows DevSecOps to achieve its full potential and decrease costs. In addition, organizations are hiring security experts to safeguard cloud resources, whether they’re public, private, or hybrid.
The best way to secure the cloud is to discover and remove it before any incident occurs. However, sometimes uncertain things happen. That is why organizations need to prepare an incident response strategy to tackle uncertain situations. This article provides a guide of best practices for cloud incident response. Before starting, let us briefly explain what incident response is.
Incident response – What is It?
Incident response enhances the security system by setting pre-planned rules. Thus developers can respond in a short time, block attacks, and reduce losses. Here are six steps of incident response:
1. Prepare a set of security policies.
2. Identify abnormal activities or threats.
3. Arrange containment procedures to reduce the risk.
4. Identify the root cause and remove them.
5. Restore the production and operating system.
6. Learn from the incident and make a stronger response system.
Best Practices for Cloud Incident Response
Here are the best practices of cloud incident response:
Focus on Monitoring System
Focus more on monitoring elements and systems like applications, users’ behavior, and APIs. Find past information on successfully handling cloud incidents. The organization needs to provide full access to the security team. Thus members can quickly detect, respond, remove and prevent attacks.
Use the Best Alerting Tools
Members need to integrate alerting tools with management tools. Organizations can use popular tools like PagerDuty and Slack. These tools are capable of enabling the existing security system and alternate between devices on demand. Visibility and accountability of the process allow identifying when it occurred and who and how they respond.
Follow Shared Responsibility Model
Most cloud providers have their incident response, management team. Still, users should ensure to add an extra security system. But the system must match with the vendor’s system. Both parties need to work under a shared responsibility model. Members need to identify what facilities vendors are providing and establish their system.
Secure Your Logs
Investigations are based on logs, which are reliable sources of information. For instance, cloud providers provide free and paid logging capabilities, including access logs and configuration logs. Teams can identify attackers, time of attacks, and targeted systems by looking at logs. That is why organizations should protect records from access by outsiders.
Train the Security System
The best way to make a process more effective is to train it. Organizations can prepare their security system by setting an attack in a safe environment in a modern cloud system. Members can use tools like AWS to design and deploy training processes in a natural network environment. Thus, members can experience real-life situations and apply them later. The above best practices will allow teams to respond better to unexpected cloud incidents.
