Cloud Incident Response: Your On-Prem Playbook Won’t Save You

It’s 7:30 PM, and I’m just sitting down to dinner when the alert hits: there’s a suspected data breach.

If you’ve been in security long enough, you know security alerts can quickly escalate to full-blown IR events. But here’s the catch: how you respond is rarely cut and dry. An endless number of elements can influence how you tackle investigations, with one of the most important factors being where critical data and assets live. Cloud vs. on-prem? Two very different beasts.

With more than 77% of businesses and IT professionals adopting a cloud hybrid approach (IBM), traditional incident response strategies require significant updates. As companies shift to cloud-first infrastructures, it’s critical that their incident response (IR) strategies evolve too. Here’s what that looks like.

What is cloud incident response?

Cloud incident response is the process of detecting, investigating, and mitigating security incidents that occur in cloud environments. A modern cloud incident response plan must adapt to provider-managed infrastructure, multi-region data storage, rapidly evolving threats, and a distributed and opaque operational surface. With “80% of companies encountering an increase in the frequency of cloud attacks,” it’s time to begin looking at your org’s cloud incident response plan (SentinelOne).

Key differences from on-prem incident response:

• Infrastructure access is limited: You’re no longer the system admin of the hardware.
• Log management stack shifts: Abstract cloud provider logging stack is often utilized, potentially introducing shorter retention or latency for retrieval.
• Responsibility is shared: The dividing line is not always understood.

Unique challenges of cloud incident response

The shared responsibility model

Cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) secure the infrastructure of the cloud; you secure everything in it. That includes data, access controls, configurations, and applications. Misunderstanding this leads to major gaps in preparedness; many orgs assume their provider will “take care of it.” Spoiler: they won’t.

Know where your provider’s role ends and where yours begins.

Limited visibility

Cloud IR often hits a wall due to:

• Disabled or incomplete logging (cost-cutting gone wrong).
• Lack of understanding of underlying systems.

To carry out effective cloud IR, you need in-depth visibility (like that supported by AWS CloudTrail/CloudWatch or Azure Monitor/Activity/Diagnostic). Whether integrations with external SIEM and SOAR platforms are used, or monitoring and alerting occurs within the cloud only, automated detection and response should be used to support quick and effective investigations.

Data sovereignty & compliance

Cloud IR spans global infrastructure, but your data might not legally be allowed to. Jurisdictional requirements can slow or complicate investigations, especially under frameworks like GDPR or HIPAA, where breach notification requirements may introduce complexity.

According to the 2023 Thales Data Threat Report, 83% of enterprises expressed concerns over data sovereignty, and 55% agreed that data privacy and compliance in the cloud have become more difficult, likely due to the emergence of requirements around digital sovereignty.

This underscores the importance of knowing where your data lives and understanding how to proceed legally post-incident, both immediately and in the long term.

Building an effective cloud incident response plan

After understanding the key differences between on-prem and cloud incident response, and the unique challenges that cloud IRs can present, it’s time to start putting together an effective cloud incident response plan that works for your company. The plan should span:

1. Pre-incident preparation
2. Detection and analysis
3. Containment, eradication, and recovery
4. Post-incident activities
5. Best practices for cloud incident response

1. Pre-incident preparation

• Define roles across your internal teams and your CSP.
• Develop cloud-specific playbooks that map to provider capabilities and SLAs.
• Enable and monitor logging and alerting from Day 1.
• Regularly create instance snapshots and backup data.

2. Detection and analysis

• Use native tools like AWS GuardDuty, Azure Sentinel, and GCP Security Command Center.
• Centralize logs and correlate with endpoint/network data.
• Validate alerts quickly with automated enrichment.

3. Containment, eradication, and recovery

• Isolate workloads and preserve evidence.
• Utilize auto-scaling and rebuild using secure images and restore from clean backups.
• Involve your CSP if needed (know how and when).

4. Post-incident activities

• Conduct cloud-specific root cause analysis.
• Update playbooks and adjust configurations.
• Ensure regulatory and contractual breach notification requirements are met.

5. Best practices for cloud incident response

• Create CSP-specific runbooks and test them regularly.
• Automate repetitive IR tasks using serverless or native scripting.
• Practice with red teams and tabletop exercises.
• Maintain open lines of communication with your cloud vendors.

Conclusion

IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report found that breaches of exclusive public cloud hosted environments were the most expensive during 2024, costing organizations a staggering average of $5.17 million, while on-premise incidents cost less than their cloud exclusive or hybrid environment counterparts. A well-architected cloud incident response plan can dramatically reduce costs and downtime. That being said, cloud incident response isn’t just a variation of your on-prem plan, it requires a complete reevaluation of how you prepare, detect, and respond. As your infrastructure evolves, your capabilities must too.

Proactive planning wins

If you’re beginning to think about your cloud IR strategy, or the dust has started to collect on your current one, maybe it’s time to partner with a cloud security expert to build one that works when your dinner is interrupted.

Ready to talk? Book a meeting with us today!