Incident Response

The incident response lifecycle provides a structured approach to handling operational incidents. AWS follows the NIST framework adapted for cloud environments, consisting of four phases: Prepare, Detect and Analyze, Contain/Eradicate/Recover, and Post-Incident Activity.

Prepare establishes the foundation for effective incident response. Create an incident response plan that defines roles, responsibilities, escalation paths, and communication templates. Set up AWS Config rules and Security Hub for continuous compliance monitoring. Deploy GuardDuty for threat detection across all accounts. Create runbooks for common incident types. Conduct regular game days to practice incident response procedures. For example, a financial services firm might prepare playbooks for data breach, DDoS attack, and unauthorized access scenarios.

Detect and Analyze identifies and classifies incidents. CloudWatch alarms detect threshold breaches. GuardDuty findings indicate potential threats. AWS Security Hub aggregates findings from multiple services. VPC Flow Logs and CloudTrail provide audit evidence. When an alarm triggers, the on-call engineer assesses severity using a defined severity matrix. Critical incidents (customer-facing outages, security breaches) immediately page the incident commander.

Contain, Eradicate, Recover addresses the incident. Containment limits blast radius: isolate affected instances, revoke compromised credentials, block malicious IP addresses. Eradication removes the root cause: patch vulnerabilities, remove malware, fix misconfigurations. Recovery restores normal operations: restart services, restore from backups, validate functionality. For example, if GuardDuty detects compromised credentials, containment might involve revoking all active sessions for the affected user while eradication involves rotating all associated access keys.

Post-Incident Activity captures learnings and prevents recurrence. Conduct a blameless post-incident review within 48 hours of incident resolution. Document a timeline, root cause analysis, contributing factors, and action items. Assign owners and deadlines for each action item. Track action items to completion. Share findings across the organization to prevent similar incidents in other teams.

Effective incident response requires pre-built runbooks, automated response capabilities, and clear communication plans.

Incident Runbooks provide step-by-step procedures for handling specific incident types. Create runbooks for: service outages, database failures, security breaches, certificate expirations, DNS issues, and capacity exhaustion. Each runbook should include: detection criteria, initial assessment steps, containment actions, escalation criteria, recovery procedures, and validation checks. Store runbooks in a central, accessible location like a wiki or AWS Systems Manager Documents.

Automated Response reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR). Use EventBridge rules to detect and automatically respond to common incidents. For example, when CloudWatch detects a service health check failure, EventBridge can trigger a Systems Manager runbook that restarts the service and sends a notification. Automated containment actions include: revoking compromised IAM credentials, blocking suspicious IP addresses through WAF, and scaling up instances during traffic spikes.

Communication Plans define how stakeholders are informed during incidents. Internal communication uses Slack or Teams channels with structured updates. External communication follows templates for status page updates and customer notifications. Define who communicates, when, and to whom at each severity level. For a Severity 1 incident affecting all customers: notify the incident commander within 5 minutes, engineering leadership within 15 minutes, and begin status page updates every 30 minutes.

Escalation Procedures define when to escalate based on time thresholds and severity. If a Severity 2 incident is not resolved within 30 minutes, escalate to senior engineering leadership. If a security incident involves customer data, immediately engage the legal and compliance teams. Document escalation contacts with backup options for each role.

War Room Management coordinates response efforts during major incidents. Establish a virtual bridge or physical war room. Assign roles: incident commander, communications lead, technical lead, and scribe. The incident commander makes decisions. The scribe documents actions and timeline. Rotate the incident commander role to prevent burnout during long incidents. Post regular status updates to the broader organization.