According to Flexera's State of the Cloud study, cloud computing has become a widely adopted technology across businesses of all sizes and industries. The report found that 94% of companies currently use cloud computing to deliver and access computing resources and services over the internet. This highlights the growing popularity and importance of cloud computing in the modern digital landscape.
What is Cloud Forensics?
Cloud forensics collects and analyzes digital evidence of a cybersecurity incident involving cloud computing services. It consists of applying traditional digital forensics techniques to investigate potential incidents in cloud environments, which may include collecting and analyzing data from various sources, including cloud storage, cloud applications, and virtual machines.
Cloud forensics is a complex and challenging area of digital forensics due to cloud environments' distributed and shared nature and the dynamic and constantly changing nature of cloud services.
Phases of Cloud Forensics
In cloud forensics, the investigative process is divided into four major phases.
- Identification: The first phase involves identifying the potential evidence sources and data relevant to the investigation, such as logs, configurations, virtual machine images, and cloud storage.
- Preservation: The second phase involves preserving the potential evidence to prevent any accidental or intentional alteration or destruction of the data. This includes taking measures to ensure the integrity of the data, such as creating a forensic image of the data and storing it in a secure location.
- Analysis: The third phase involves analyzing the collected data to identify potential evidence relevant to the investigation. This may include identifying and analyzing system logs, network traffic, and other digital artifacts.
- Presentation/Reporting: The final phase involves documenting the investigation's findings in a comprehensive report that can be used for legal or other purposes.
Differences Between Digital Forensics and Cloud Forensics
The main difference
between digital forensics and cloud forensics is that cloud forensics focuses
on investigating incidents involving cloud computing environments. In contrast,
digital forensics deals with any digital device or system. Here are the most
common differences between digital forensics and cloud
forensics.
|
Digital
Forensics |
Cloud
Forensics |
|
● Digital forensics involves collecting and analyzing
digital evidence from devices such as computers, smartphones, servers, and
other digital storage media, to identify potential evidence related to a
particular incident. |
● Cloud forensics involves investigating incidents that
involve cloud computing environments, which can be distributed, dynamic, and
shared among multiple parties. |
|
●
Digital forensics is
often conducted in the context of proceedings, such as criminal
investigations or civil litigation. |
● Cloud forensics also has legal implications. Still, it
is also heavily influenced by the cloud providers' specific Service Level
Agreements (SLAs) and Terms of Service (ToS). |
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