STRENGTHENING CLOUD SECURITY INCIDENT MANAGEMENT THROUGH ZERO-TRUST ARCHITECTURE, CONTINUOUS THREAT MONITORING AND AUTOMATED INCIDENT RESPONSE

Adebimpe Mary Babsalaam

doi:10.5281/zenodo.23968866

Abstract

The increasing adoption of cloud computing has transformed enterprise digital infrastructure while introducing complex security challenges associated with distributed workloads, identity vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and expanding attack surfaces. Conventional security approaches frequently rely on fragmented monitoring, static access controls, and manual incident response, limiting their effectiveness against sophisticated and rapidly evolving cyber threats. This study proposes an integrated cloud security incident management framework combining zero-trust architecture, continuous threat monitoring, and automated incident response. The framework incorporates identity-aware access enforcement, behavioural anomaly detection, security telemetry correlation, contextual risk assessment, and policy-governed remediation to support coordinated threat identification and containment. A layered architecture integrates cloud security logs, authentication events, network telemetry, and workload activity to generate evidence-based incident classifications and prioritised response decisions. A reproducible validation methodology is proposed using controlled attack scenarios involving credential compromise, privilege escalation, unauthorised access, and malicious workload behaviour. Evaluation measures include detection accuracy, false-positive rates, containment effectiveness, response latency, and recovery duration. The proposed framework establishes a systematic foundation for strengthening cloud security resilience while addressing automation risks, operational continuity, scalability, and security governance requirements across heterogeneous cloud environments.

Keywords

Cloud Security; Zero-Trust Architecture; Continuous Threat Monitoring; Automated Incident Response; Threat Detection; Cloud Security Incident Management.

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