Vault Agentics
Incident Response

An Incident Response Playbook for the Cloud Era

Cloud incidents move faster, span more accounts, and produce more evidence than on-prem ever did. Your playbook should reflect that.

By Hani Braish8 min read

The first ten minutes of a cloud incident determine the next ten days.

Pre-commit before the incident

  • A break-glass account in every cloud tenant, with hardware-backed credentials stored offline.
  • A read-only forensics role pre-deployed to every account.
  • Immutable log destinations the production account cannot delete from.

The first ten minutes

  1. Declare. Open a dedicated channel. Assign an incident commander.
  2. Contain. Revoke suspected credentials before you finish investigating.
  3. Preserve. Snapshot affected resources before anyone is tempted to "just restart it".

After the dust settles

Run a blameless postmortem within five business days. Publish the timeline internally. The lessons compound; the blame does not.

Incident ResponseCloudForensics

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