Book Image

Cloud Security Handbook

By : Eyal Estrin
Book Image

Cloud Security Handbook

By: Eyal Estrin

Overview of this book

Securing resources in the cloud is challenging, given that each provider has different mechanisms and processes. Cloud Security Handbook helps you to understand how to embed security best practices in each of the infrastructure building blocks that exist in public clouds. This book will enable information security and cloud engineers to recognize the risks involved in public cloud and find out how to implement security controls as they design, build, and maintain environments in the cloud. You'll begin by learning about the shared responsibility model, cloud service models, and cloud deployment models, before getting to grips with the fundamentals of compute, storage, networking, identity management, encryption, and more. Next, you'll explore common threats and discover how to stay in compliance in cloud environments. As you make progress, you'll implement security in small-scale cloud environments through to production-ready large-scale environments, including hybrid clouds and multi-cloud environments. This book not only focuses on cloud services in general, but it also provides actual examples for using AWS, Azure, and GCP built-in services and capabilities. By the end of this cloud security book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of how to implement security in cloud environments effectively.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Securing Infrastructure Cloud Services
6
Section 2: Deep Dive into IAM, Auditing, and Encryption
10
Section 3: Threats and Compliance Management
14
Section 4: Advanced Use of Cloud Services

What is a cloud service?

As part of this introduction, let's define the terminology to make sure we are all on the same page.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud as a technology that has the following five characteristics:

  • On-demand self-service: Imagine you wish to open a blog and you need compute resources. Instead of purchasing hardware and waiting for the vendor to ship it to your office and having to deploy software, the easier alternative can be a self-service portal, where you can select a pre-installed operating system and content management system that you can deploy within a few minutes by yourself.
  • Broad network access: Consider having enough network access (the type that large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have) to serve millions of end users with your application.
  • Resource pooling: Consider having thousands of computers, running in a large server farm, and being able to maximize their use (from CPU, memory, and storage capacity), instead of having a single server running 10% of its CPU utilization.
  • Rapid elasticity: Consider having the ability to increase and decrease the amount of compute resources (from a single server to thousands of servers, and then back to a single server), all according to your application or service needs.
  • Measured service: Consider having the ability to pay for only the resources you consumed and being able to generate a billing report that shows which resources have been used and how much you must pay for the resources.

Further details relating to the NIST definition can be found at the following link:

https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-145.pdf