Cloud Forensics: Basics

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Cloud computing is said to be a game changing technologies in the recent history of computing. Unfortunately, due to its young age, cloud companies don’t have yet any process that allows for a set procedure on how to investigate or go about cloud issues. Due to this absence, they have no means of ensuring the robustness and suitability of cloud services when it comes to supporting investigations of criminal activity.


Introduction

Cloud computing technology has shown massive game-changing potential akin to the ones exhibited by other significant computing technologies such as mainframes, PCs, minicomputers, and even smartphones. It has the ability to radically alter the way information technology services are created, accessed, and manage.
The 2009 F5 cloud computing survey has recently revealed that 66% of IT managers from their sample have dedicated budgets for the cloud, with 71% expecting cloud computing budgets to grow larger over the next two years. On the other hand, the number of crimes related to computers and the Internet has grown over the last decade, which in turn resulted in an equal increase in companies that want to assist law enforcement by using digital evidence to determine the perpetrators, methods, victims, and timing of computer crime. This resulted in digital forensics evolving enough to assure proper representation of cyber crime evidence data in court. However, with storage capacity outpacing network bandwidth and latency improvements, forensic data is starting to grow exponentially to the point that it makes it harder to process them in a timely manner.
With the rise of cloud computing, the problem with scale for digital forensics has been exacerbated, and what’s even worse, it has also created a new avenue for cybercrime investigation with different challenges. Digital forensic practitioners must then try to adopt and extend their digital forensic skills and tools into cloud computing environments as well as help cloud organizations and cloud consumers in establishing and developing forensic capability, as well as reduce cloud security risks. Not doing so will result in a lot of difficulties when it comes to carrying out investigations on critical incidents that happen in the Cloud, including criminal intrusions and policy violations. For definition of cloud forensics and complete details here is link to source article at cloudTimes