An insight into cloud forensic readiness by leading cloud service providers: a survey

In today’s digital world, it is hard to imagine the Information Technology field without cloud computing as it saves millions of dollars every year and enables it to focus on its core business rather than on managing complex computing infrastructure. However, the adoption of the cloud opens the window for cloud crimes. Hence, cloud forensics is the need of the hour. Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) have to depend on Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) for investigating cloud crimes. Unfortunately, the LEAs are not aware of the forensic procedures implemented by the CSPs, nor are the details corresponding to forensic procedures are properly documented by the CSPs. This paper aims to study the forensic readiness of the leading CSPs and present their forensic workflow. We also compared these CSPs against various parameters based on the cloud services provisioned by them for forensics. The recent research published in this domain lists the challenges of cloud forensics and describes the proposed solutions. However, the current forensic procedures implemented by the leading CSPs have not been detailed in any of these papers. Thus, we believe that this survey would help the LEAs, forensic experts, security analysts, and first incident responders with an insight on the current forensic procedures implemented by the leading CSPs and help them in their investigation, designing standard operating procedures, etc.