Cloud Security Handbook

Eyal Estrin

• Editorial: Packt Publishing
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781800565722
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencia de la computación
• Categoría: Ciberseguridad

A comprehensive reference guide to securing the basic building blocks of cloud services, with actual examples for leveraging Azure, AWS, and GCP built-in services and capabilitiesKey Features• Discover practical techniques for implementing cloud security• Learn how to secure your data and core cloud infrastructure to suit your business needs• Implement encryption, detect cloud threats and misconfiguration, and achieve compliance in the cloudBook DescriptionSecuring 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.What you will learn• Secure compute, storage, and networking services in the cloud• Get to grips with identity management in the cloud• Audit and monitor cloud services from a security point of view• Identify common threats and implement encryption solutions in cloud services• Maintain security and compliance in the cloud• Implement security in hybrid and multi-cloud environments• Design and maintain security in a large-scale cloud environmentWho this book is forThis book is for IT or information security personnel taking their first steps in the public cloud or migrating existing environments to the cloud. Cloud engineers, cloud architects, or cloud security professionals maintaining production environments in the cloud will also benefit from this book. Prior experience of deploying virtual machines, using storage services, and networking will help you to get the most out of this book.

Section 1: Securing Infrastructure Cloud Services

On completion of this part, you will have a solid understanding of how to secure the basic building blocks of cloud services (cloud deployment and service models, compute, storage, and network)

This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Introduction to Cloud Security
• Chapter 2, Securing Compute Services
• Chapter 3, Securing Storage Services
• Chapter 4, Securing Network Services

Chapter 1: Introduction to Cloud Security

This book, Cloud Security Techniques and Best Practices, is meant for various audiences. You could be taking your first steps working with cloud services, or you could be coming from an IT perspective and want to know about various compute and storage services and how to configure them securely. Or, you might be working in information security and want to know the various authentication, encryption, and audit services and how to configure them securely, or you might be working with architecture and want to know how to design large-scale environments in the cloud in a secure way.

Reading this book will allow you to make the most of cloud services while focusing on security aspects. Before discussing cloud services in more detail, let me share my opinion regarding cloud services.

The world of IT is changing. For decades, organizations used to purchase physical hardware, install operating systems, and deploy software. This routine required a lot of ongoing maintenance (for patch deployment, backup, monitoring, and so on).

The cloud introduced a new paradigm – that is, the ability to consume managed services to achieve the same goal of running software (from file servers to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products), while using the expertise of the hyper-scale cloud providers.

Some well-known use cases of cloud computing are as follows:

• Netflix – one of the largest video streaming services world-wide. It uses AWS to run its media streaming services:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-case-study

• Mercedes-Benz – one of the most famous automotive brands. It uses Azure to run its research and development:

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/784791-mercedes-benz-r-and-d-creates-container-driven-cars-powered-by-microsoft-azure

• Home Depot – the largest home improvement retailer in the United States. It uses Google Cloud to run its online stores:

https://cloud.google.com/customers/featured/the-home-depot

In this book, we will compare various aspects of cloud computing (from fundamental services such as compute, storage, and networking, to compliance management and best practices for building and maintaining large-scale environments in a secure way), while reviewing the different alternatives offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

It does not matter which organization you are coming from – this book will allow you to have a better understanding of how to achieve security in any of the large hyper-scale cloud providers.

You do not have to read everything – simply find out which cloud provider is common at your workplace or which cloud provider you wish to focus on, and feel free to skip the rest.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Why we need security
• Cloud service models
• Cloud deployment models
• The shared responsibility model

Technical requirements

This chapter is an introduction to cloud security, so there are no technical requirements.

What is a cloud service?

As part of this introduction, let's define the terminology to make sure we are all on the same page.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud as a technology that has the following five characteristics:

• On-demand self-service: Imagine you wish to open a blog and you need compute resources. Instead of purchasing hardware and waiting for the vendor to ship it to your office and having to deploy software, the easier alternative can be a self-service portal, where you can select a pre-installed operating system and content management system that you can deploy within a few minutes by yourself.
• Broad network access: Consider having enough network access (the type that large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have) to serve millions of end users with your application.
• Resource pooling: Consider having thousands of computers, running in a large server farm, and being able to maximize their use (from CPU, memory, and storage capacity), instead of having a single server running 10% of its CPU utilization.
• Rapid elasticity: Consider having the ability to increase and decrease the amount of compute resources (from a single server to thousands of servers, and then back to a single server), all according to your application or service needs.
• Measured service: Consider having the ability to pay for only the resources you consumed and being able to generate a billing report that shows which resources have been used and how much you must pay for the resources.

Further details relating to the NIST definition can be found at the following link:

https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-145.pdf

What are the cloud deployment models?

Now that we understand what the cloud characteristics are, let's talk about cloud deployment models:

• Private cloud: An infrastructure deployed and maintained by a single organization. Let's say we are a large financial organization (such as a bank or insurance organization), we would like to serve various departments in our organization (from HR, IT, sales, and so on), and w...