Book Image

Cloud Security Automation

By : Prashant Priyam
Book Image

Cloud Security Automation

By: Prashant Priyam

Overview of this book

Security issues are still a major concern for all IT organizations. For many enterprises, the move to cloud computing has raised concerns for security, but when applications are architected with focus on security, cloud platforms can be made just as secure as on-premises platforms. Cloud instances can be kept secure by employing security automation that helps make your data meet your organization's security policy. This book starts with the basics of why cloud security is important and how automation can be the most effective way of controlling cloud security. You will then delve deeper into the AWS cloud environment and its security services by dealing with security functions such as Identity and Access Management and will also learn how these services can be automated. Moving forward, you will come across aspects such as cloud storage and data security, automating cloud deployments, and so on. Then, you'll work with OpenStack security modules and learn how private cloud security functions can be automated for better time- and cost-effectiveness. Toward the end of the book, you will gain an understanding of the security compliance requirements for your Cloud. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience of automating your cloud security and governance.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Monitoring


Monitoring plays a crucial role in automating security in the cloud environment. For monitoring in AWS, we use CloudWatch. Apart from this, we can also use open source tools, such as Nagios and Zabbix.

CloudWatch helps you define metrics and alerts for your workload running on AWS.

Apart from this, AWS has introduced Amazon Macie under security services, which gives you a very interactive dashboard for your AWS account. Amazon Macie uses machine learning methods to discover, classify, and protect your data:

In the preceding screenshot, you can see the alerts recorded by Macie. In the backend, it scans through CloudTrail to generate the alerts and dashboards. It reads all the trails in real time and uses machine learning methods to generate the alerts:

If you go to the SETTINGS section of Macie, it will show you the multiple settings that Macie uses to protect your monitored data:

At the bottom, it has one option called Basic alert, where you can define the alerts for Macie to inform...