Need Data from External Vendor or MSP
Critical evidence resides with a third-party managed service provider, SaaS vendor, or hosting company. Your team has no direct access and must navigate contractual, legal, and technical hurdles to obtain logs or images.
Signals
- •Investigation requires logs from a system managed entirely by an external MSP
- •The vendor SLA does not include on-demand forensic log exports
- •IR team has no administrative credentials to the vendor-managed environment
- •Initial contact with the vendor resulted in delays or an escalation to their legal/security team
Pivot Actions
- 1.Immediately file a formal written request citing contractual incident-response clauses and SLA obligations
- 2.Escalate through your legal team to invoke breach-notification cooperation requirements if applicable
- 3.Identify what data you CAN collect independently (network traffic to/from vendor-hosted systems, authentication logs on your side)
- 4.Engage your executive sponsor to make a direct leadership-to-leadership request for expedited access
- 5.Document every request, timestamp, and response for potential regulatory or litigation purposes
Alternate Evidence Sources
- •Your own firewall and proxy logs capturing traffic to/from the vendor-managed environment
- •Authentication and SSO logs on your identity provider showing access to vendor-hosted apps
- •Email and communication logs showing data flows between your organization and the vendor