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

Securing VMs

Each cloud provider has its own implementation of VMs (or virtual servers), but at the end of the day, the basic idea is the same:

  1. Select a machine type (or size) – a ratio between the amount of virtual CPU (vCPU) and memory, according to their requirements (general-purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, and so on).
  2. Select a preinstalled image of an operating system (from Windows to Linux flavors).
  3. Configure storage (adding additional volumes, connecting to file sharing services, and others).
  4. Configure network settings (from network access controls to micro-segmentation, and others).
  5. Configure permissions to access cloud resources.
  6. Deploy an application.
  7. Begin using the service.
  8. Carry out ongoing maintenance of the operating system.

According to the shared responsibility model, when using IaaS, we (as the customers) are responsible for the deployment and maintenance of virtual servers, as explained in the coming...