Securing Your Cloud Environment

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Leonel Navarro.

Security in the cloud has been a hot topic for a long time now, yet many individuals and organizations fail to realize the implications of security, while others have not performed enough due diligence to seize the necessary solution. Cloud computing requires controls for addressing threats that jeopardize confidentiality, integrity and availability. The purpose of this article is to delineate existing cloud security implications and determine which cloud archetype is best suited for a particular business case.

Security implications change based on cloud use case and the chosen cloud archetype. The most common cloud computing use cases relate to infrastructure, since organizations leverage from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to migrate data centers to a virtualized environment. However, two more archetypes promise even more value when it comes to applications. These fall into Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and can be leveraged from cloud provider web services and even fully functional applications through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). To better understand the security implications, let’s focus on the infrastructure and applications use cases…

Infrastructure

When organizations think of infrastructure, migrating (IaaS) their data centers to the cloud usually comes to mind, by creating virtualized environments that provide the same functionality but include other benefits, from cost reduction to resiliency. This specific use case, even when implemented as a private cloud, has threats that usually go ignored with no control put in place, leaving environments vulnerable to attacks. The security implications include:…

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