Chapter 1: Introduction to Cloud Security

This book, Cloud Security Techniques and Best Practices, is meant for various audiences. You could be taking your first steps working with cloud services, or you could be coming from an IT perspective and want to know about various compute and storage services and how to configure them securely. Or, you might be working in information security and want to know the various authentication, encryption, and audit services and how to configure them securely, or you might be working with architecture and want to know how to design large-scale environments in the cloud in a secure way.

Reading this book will allow you to make the most of cloud services while focusing on security aspects. Before discussing cloud services in more detail, let me share my opinion regarding cloud services.

The world of IT is changing. For decades, organizations used to purchase physical hardware, install operating systems, and deploy software. This routine required a lot of ongoing maintenance (for patch deployment, backup, monitoring, and so on).

The cloud introduced a new paradigm – that is, the ability to consume managed services to achieve the same goal of running software (from file servers to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products), while using the expertise of the hyper-scale cloud providers.

Some well-known use cases of cloud computing are as follows:

• Netflix – one of the largest video streaming services world-wide. It uses AWS to run its media streaming services:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-case-study

• Mercedes-Benz – one of the most famous automotive brands. It uses Azure to run its research and development:

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/784791-mercedes-benz-r-and-d-creates-container-driven-cars-powered-by-microsoft-azure

• Home Depot – the largest home improvement retailer in the United States. It uses Google Cloud to run its online stores:

https://cloud.google.com/customers/featured/the-home-depot

In this book, we will compare various aspects of cloud computing (from fundamental services such as compute, storage, and networking, to compliance management and best practices for building and maintaining large-scale environments in a secure way), while reviewing the different alternatives offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

It does not matter which organization you are coming from – this book will allow you to have a better understanding of how to achieve security in any of the large hyper-scale cloud providers.

You do not have to read everything – simply find out which cloud provider is common at your workplace or which cloud provider you wish to focus on, and feel free to skip the rest.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Why we need security
• Cloud service models
• Cloud deployment models
• The shared responsibility model