The Incident Response Lifecycle on AWS

A security incident is any event that may compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of your AWS resources or data. It could be a leaked access key, a malware-infected instance, or an exposed S3 bucket.

Incident response (IR) is the structured process of preparing for, detecting, and recovering from these events. On AWS, the cloud gives you speed and automation that on-premises teams can only dream of.

AWS frames incident response in three broad phases, each building on the last:

• Prepare — set up the people, processes, and tooling before anything happens.
• Operations — detect, analyze, contain, eradicate, and recover during an active event.
• Post-incident — learn from what happened and improve.

These map closely to the classic NIST lifecycle the exam expects you to know.