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Arm yourself against cloud attacks

Stormy Weather

Article from ADMIN 53/2019

By Martin Loschwitz

We present approaches and solutions for protecting yourself against attacks in the cloud.

If your clients lose confidence in your ability to operate a system well and securely, you can experience considerable financial losses, especially after a successful large-scale attack. In the worst case, you could find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit if the question of gross negligence is raised.

None of that changes in the cloud. Admittedly, unlike conventional setups, the challenge is no longer unique to the provider. All stakeholders share the responsibility for security: From the perspective of the platform, admins ensure that standards (e.g., meaningful network segmentation, software-defined networking (SDN), security policy enforcement, and other functions) are implemented and work as desired to provide security at the platform level. When rolling out their own applications in the cloud, customers and external service providers also ensure that they comply with security best practices.

However, what are these best practices in the context of the cloud? How do customers and external service providers protect their virtual environments from the vast array of attacks that can occur? How do they even find out that something is wrong? Many conventional solutions from the past no longer work in clouds, so the question arises: Which approaches and tools are available to let admins thumb their noses from the outset at potential crooks? In this article, I slip into the perspective of a cloud customer and investigate precisely these questions.

What Is the Threat Scenario?

If you are familiar with security in the IT context, you will be aware that the first relevant question always relates to the threat scenario you want to counter. The answers result in individual safety solutions which, in the worst case, do not share any common components. If you want comprehensive security, you can't avoid this groundwork. Cloud customers have more than enough threat scenarios with which to

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