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

IAM features


In AWS, IAM is available as a service that is global in scope. Here, global means the usage scope of IAM is global; it is defined once and can be used across all the AWS regions. It's not a region-specific service.

IAM provides the following features:

  • Shared or cross-account access: Using IAM, you can permit other users to administer your AWS services and can also allow users in other AWS accounts to manage your AWS services without passwords or access keys.
  • Component level permission: In IAM, you can define access policies on a component level. Suppose that if you have allowed a user to access only one S3 bucket, he/she won't be able to access other services and other S3 buckets.
  • Secure access of services to an application that runs on EC2 or ECS: Let's assume that we have a web server running on an AWS EC2 instance and the static content is stored on a S3 bucket. One method is to provide access keys- and secret keys-based access to S3 bucket, which will be hardcoded with web application...