Book Image

Multi-Cloud Architecture and Governance

By : Jeroen Mulder
Book Image

Multi-Cloud Architecture and Governance

By: Jeroen Mulder

Overview of this book

Multi-cloud has emerged as one of the top cloud computing trends, with businesses wanting to reduce their reliance on only one vendor. But when organizations shift to multiple cloud services without a clear strategy, they may face certain difficulties, in terms of how to stay in control, how to keep all the different components secure, and how to execute the cross-cloud development of applications. This book combines best practices from different cloud adoption frameworks to help you find solutions to these problems. With step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, you’ll begin by planning the foundation, creating the architecture, designing the governance model, and implementing tools, processes, and technologies to manage multi-cloud environments. You’ll then discover how to design workload environments using different cloud propositions, understand how to optimize the use of these cloud technologies, and automate and monitor the environments. As you advance, you’ll delve into multi-cloud governance, defining clear demarcation models and management processes. Finally, you’ll learn about managing identities in multi-cloud: who’s doing what, why, when, and where. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create, implement, and manage multi-cloud architectures with confidence
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Introduction to Architecture and Governance for Multi-Cloud Environments
7
Section 2 – Getting the Basics Right with BaseOps
12
Section 3 – Cost Control in Multi-Cloud with FinOps
17
Section 4 – Security Control in Multi-Cloud with SecOps
22
Section 5 – Structured Development on Multi-Cloud Environments with DevOps

Exploring Privileged Access Management (PAM)

In previous sections, the principle of least privilege was introduced: users only get the minimum set of rights to the systems that they are authorized for/require. Least privilege works with non-privileged accounts or least-privileged user accounts (LUA). Typically, there are two types of LUA:

  • Standard user accounts
  • Guest user accounts

Both types of accounts are very limited in terms of user rights.

There are situations where these accounts simply aren't sufficient and inhibit people from trying to do their job. The user would then need elevated rights: rights that are temporarily assigned so that the user can continue with their work. An account with such elevated rights is called a privileged account. Examples of privileged accounts are the following:

  • Domain administrative accounts: Accessing all resources in the domain
  • AD accounts: Accessing AD with rights to, for example, add or remove identities...