Preface

As our society moves from an analog world to a digital world, it is easier for ill-intentioned people to attack privates, companies, banks, and government for their advantage or for the other party's damage. Since the beginning of information technologies, we have seen a shift to digitalize our world, and this process has been accelerating ever since. The virtualization has concentrated more data on even less systems, making these systems very nice targets for attacks. Making the clouds secure will be one of the biggest security challenges for the next 10 years, from my point of view. The goal of this book is to prepare cloud administrators for this challenge.

The structure of this book is designed to give you a wide perspective on security. This has multiple reasons. First of all, programs change, but a secure mindset is often more important than knowing how to secure a very specific software, also because very often people specialize in a particular part of the IT sector and kind of lose track of what there is around the technology they master. This often leads to huge security problems in between the areas of expertise of the various people of the team.

OpenStack allows very powerful infrastructures, but tends to be pretty complex, being a solution to many different situations, making it, often, very interesting from a business point of view, but very hard to manage safely.