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

Conducting security monitoring and audit trails

Monitoring is a crucial part of security in the cloud. Monitoring in the context of cloud security is about logging activities done on your cloud environments, such as user login events (both success and failure), actions taken (who did what and when, and what was the end result – success or failure), documenting all actions done (also known as an audit trail), storing events in a central repository with limited access to logs (according to the need to know concept), raising alerts according to pre-configured rules (for example, only alert me when the root account or administrator managed to successfully log in to the management console), and being able to take actions.

In cloud environments, all resources are based on APIs, which allows us to deploy the resources and make changes to them. We control cloud resources (as we have seen in previous chapters) using security controls (from security groups through a WAF. All cloud...