Cloud Forensics

Expert Cloud Forensics Across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Microsoft 365, and Beyond

As data and operations move to the cloud, so do threats, insider risks, and the evidence needed to understand them. Cloud environments introduce forensic challenges that traditional methods were not designed for: data distributed across jurisdictions, logs that expire on short retention windows, shared infrastructure, and no physical media to seize and image.

We have spent years working through those challenges on real cases. Our cloud forensics service extracts, preserves, and analyses digital evidence from cloud environments, giving investigators and legal teams what they need when incidents happen there.

THE CLOUD FORENSICS IMPERATIVE

Cloud adoption across Africa is accelerating. The continent's cloud market is growing at 25 to 30% annually (Xalam Analytics), driven primarily by financial services, government, and telecommunications. As more infrastructure moves off-premise, more forensic evidence moves with it, and more of it sits behind retention policies that delete it automatically.

The Cloud Security Alliance consistently identifies misconfiguration as the leading cause of cloud security incidents, ahead of account compromise, insecure interfaces, and insider threats. Misconfigurations also affect log integrity and evidence availability, which means the same environment that enabled the breach may also be working against the investigation.

Cloud forensics has a time problem that traditional disk forensics does not. Log data may be spread across multiple geographic regions, subject to provider-controlled retention periods, and gone within days if nobody moves to capture it. Many African organisations discover cloud breaches only after receiving a third-party notification, by which point some evidence has already been overwritten. Speed is not just a best practice here; it is the difference between a recoverable investigation and a partial one.

WHAT WE DO

Cloud Log Acquisition and Preservation

Before evidence is lost to automatic deletion, our team rapidly acquires and preserves audit logs, access logs, activity trails, and administrative records from cloud management planes, including AWS CloudTrail, Azure Activity Log, Google Cloud Audit Logs, and Microsoft 365 compliance logs.

Cloud Storage and Data Analysis

We investigate what data was stored, accessed, shared, copied, or deleted in cloud storage environments, including document sharing platforms, object storage, and database services.

Identity and Access Investigation

Cloud attacks frequently involve credential compromise or privilege escalation. We analyse identity and access management (IAM) records to establish exactly who accessed what, when, and from where.

SaaS Platform Forensics

Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and similar platforms hold more forensic data than most people realise: email metadata, document version histories, collaboration records, and access logs that can reconstruct events in considerable detail. We know how to get at it.

Cloud Incident Investigation

When a cloud environment has been breached, we conduct a full investigation: tracing the attacker's path, identifying all affected resources, quantifying data exposure, and documenting findings for regulatory and legal purposes.

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Environments

Many organisations run across multiple cloud providers or combine cloud with on-premise infrastructure. We have the cross-platform expertise to investigate those environments without treating each boundary as a dead end.