Secure cloud infrastructure design involves leveraging the inherent strengths of cloud computing
The basis for a secure cloud infrastructure in the era of digitization and remote working can be formed by the transition to every such digitization exposing certain vulnerabilities that need to be assessed and applied with the necessary security building blocks. Organisations have to deliver services over cloud when they envision enabling a secure service for employees to work remotely. Cloud is driving digitalization and promoting organizations to move their current workloads to operate from cloud and support the launch of new services in the age of new normal. In digital adoption to support application modernization, improve customer experience and enable the culture of remote working with efficient collaboration, cloud now is de-facto to serve as a backbone for organizations.
55 per cent of respondents have accelerated the adoption of cloud computing, as per a recent IEEE CIO and CTO survey.
A recent NASSCOM report revealed that the Indian cloud computing market, which is expected to grow at 30 per cent (year-on-year) to reach $7.1 billion by 2022, is currently valued at $2.2 billion.
93 per cent of Indian entities fall prey to public cloud security breaches. A crucial component to make a company’s program secure, is defining policies, which ensures the integrity and privacy of information and helps teams make the right decisions quickly and efficiently, according to a recent survey.
Few ways of defining policies to build a secure cloud infrastructure include identifying and accessing the management that ensures right entities are offered the right level of access, ensuring data integrity, data retention, and confidentiality to protect data and information assets, software, system and service assurance that ensures defining the required controls across the software cycle, IT service management ensures the policies defined to control and manage the incident and problem management segments associated with information security and threat and vulnerability management ensuring adequate policies are defined for scanning, patching, threat detection, end-point security, and vulnerability detection.
Life will not become easy by simply moving applications or databases on the cloud to benefit from it. A well thought out architecture design for a secure cloud infrastructure involves leveraging the inherent strengths of cloud computing. It forms the backbone of cloud, resulting in smart decisions.
Secure workload determines how well the workload protection is managed and workload encryption is done. Managing the same has to be done deploying anti-malware software and encryption keys. This avoids unauthorized endpoints to access the network and ensures that remote workforces device tokens are validated through end-point security.
To define the rules to permit or deny the traffic, network segmentation to create subnets and have better control and enforcement of policies, network access control lists to control the data ingress and egress at protocol and subnet level, a secure network ensures that the depth of defence is created through network security groups.
To safeguard systems such as firewalls, browser isolations, DNS security isolations, and filtering, a secure perimeter ensures the required policies are defined. Further, to avoid Disturbed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, it ensures that the protection is enabled.
Evolution of cloud computing enables organizations to reduce their expenditure on IT infrastructure and is advantageous for organizations, but security is a major concern while transitioning to cloud. Few considerations for building a secure cloud infrastructure include implementing security hardening as per industry benchmarks (E.g.: CIS), protection against attacks beyond authorized remote working employees’ endpoints by deploying endpoint security solutions, implementing host-based firewall and IPS to protect against attacks over east-west traffic, ensuring only authorized processes run on the system by consideration of application whitelisting, disabling all ports, protocols, and services that are not in use, creating and maintaining golden images, installing software from trusted sources and defining and implementing a structured security patch management process.
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