Building the Infrastructure for Cloud Security: A Solutions View

by Raghuram Yeluri, Enrique Castro-leon

For cloud users and providers alike, security is an everyday concern, yet there are very few books covering cloud security as a main subject. This book will help address this information gap from an Information Technology solution and usage-centric view of cloud infrastructure security. The book highlights the fundamental technology components necessary to build and enable trusted clouds. Here also is an explanation of the security and compliance challenges organizations face as they migrate mission-criticalapplications to the cloud, and how trusted clouds, that have their integrity rooted in hardware, can address these challenges.



This book

Use cases and solution reference architectures to enable infrastructure integrity and the creation of trusted pools leveraging Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). Trusted geo-location management in the cloud, enabling workload and data location compliance and boundary control usages in the cloud. OpenStack-based reference architecture of tenant-controlled virtual machine and workload protection in the cloud. A reference design to enable secure hybrid clouds for a cloud bursting use case, providing infrastructure visibility and control to organizations."A valuable guide to the next generation of cloud security and hardware based root of trust. More than an explanation of the what and how, is the explanation of why. And why you can’t afford to ignore it!" —Vince Lubsey, Vice President, Product Development, Virtustream Inc.

" Raghu provides a valuable reference for the new 'inside out' approach, where trust in hardware, software, and privileged users is never assumed—but instead measured, attested, and limited according to least privilege principles." —John Skinner, Vice President, HyTrust Inc.

"Traditional parameter based defenses are in sufficient in the cloud. Raghu's book addresses this problem head-on by highlighting unique usage models to enable trusted infrastructure in this open environment. A must read if you are exposed in cloud." —Nikhil Sharma, Sr. Director of Cloud Solutions, Office of CTO, EMC Corporation

368 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 26, 2014

Reviews

[prasuna · Rating 5 out of 5]

must read for security professionals

must read for professionals planning to build secure cloud environment explanation of Trusted computing in simple and easy to understand terms

[David Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book I read to research this post was Building the Infrastructure For Cloud Security by Raghuram Yeluri et al which is an excellent book which I downloaded for free from kindle. This book is about the infrastructure and security that must be provided by Cloud Computing Providers. They are companies that rent out space on their servers to other companies or individuals and often will either provide it free or for a few dollars per month especially with small companies. Some big companies may pay a lot more and may even require an entire server or several servers. These data centers will typically cost around $200 million and have thousands or even millions of clients most of whom will be small companies. One issue is bandwidth and if one client has a lot of traffic will it affect other clients. One way around this is servicing 2 regions from the same data center so that when one region experiences heavy traffic the other region in another part of the world is relatively light. This only works for the biggest providers. Some cloud providers only work with linux while others give several options. Another issue is if one user uploads a virus or worm it can potentially attack other users at least on the same server. Intel have developed open attestation which as the name suggests is an open source standard program for dividing and protecting different clients. Of course things like anti virus and anti spyware software are even more crucial in this kind of situation. A lot of the security is provided by the Cloud Provider. This makes it more difficult but not impossible for potential criminals to hack companies servers due to the huge amount of financial clout these Cloud Providers have and can spend on security. A lot of businesses are starting to use virtualization like VMware. These help limit the damage a virus can do by limiting permissions assigned to that account to just what the user needs. I really enjoyed reading this book which is a decent length and quite informative. Some like me who don't specialize in Cloud security might find it a bit difficult to follow but it's still interesting.