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

Chapter 1. Introduction to Cloud Security

In this chapter, we will learn the basics of the cloud and cloud security.

To understand cloud security, we first need to understand the types of clouds and their architecture. There are many global standard organizations such as NIST and CSA who are defining the different aspects of clouds.

As per the NIST definition of cloud computing (https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/nist-cloud-computing-program-nccp), in simple terms we can say that the cloud offers on-demand accessibility of computing, networking, storage, databases, and applications. Here you do not have to worry about the purchase of physical boxes (CapEx) to run your application. You pay the cost of the resource based on the usage (OpEx).

Note

CapEx stands for capital expenditures and denotes one-time cost investment to purchase any resource, for example, the purchase of a physical server.

OpEx stands for operating expenditures and denotes expenses to make the resource operational, for example, the purchase of manpower, power, OS, and so on to make the server operational.

We can say that the cloud provides abstraction of the underlying infrastructure using hypervisors and orchestrates to allocate resources to multiple tenants from the aggregated resource pool on demand.

The cloud offers multitenancy, agility, scalability, availability, and security. Let's understand what all these terms mean.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Types of cloud
  • Cloud security
  • Shared responsibility model
  • Key concern areas of cloud security