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

Chapter 3: Securing Storage Services

In the previous chapter, we covered compute services. After compute services, the second most common resource everyone talks about is storage – from object storage to block storage (which is also known as instance attached storage), to file storage.

We are using storage services to store our data.

The following is a list of common threats that might impact our data when it is stored in the cloud:

  • Unauthorized access
  • Data leakage
  • Data exfiltration
  • Data loss

As a best practice, we should always use the following countermeasures when storing data in the cloud:

  • Access-control lists (ACLs; note that each cloud provider has its own implementation) and Identity and Access Management (IAM), to restrict access from our cloud environment to the storage service
  • Encryption at both transit and rest to ensure data confidentiality
  • Auditing to have a log of who has access to our data and what actions were...