Here’s a quick & dirty assessment for your organization’s Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery maturity – When it comes to Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery, what is your organization’s mission, goals, and objectives? What are the outputs of your value chain? (These are typically the products and services you produce) Do you have an established business continuity management system (BCMS)? What…
QuickGuide: Connecting to a Private EC2 Instance from your laptop/desktop
Step 1 – Create Bastion Host a) Navigate to EC2 Dashboard, click on Launch instance b) Select Amazon Linux 2, click Next c) Choose t2.micro as Instance Type, click Next d) Select default VPC, select subnet if you have a preference e) Leave everything else as is, click Next f) Leave Storage as is, click…
Cloud Encryption Challenges
There are myriad factors influencing encryption considerations and associated implementations in the enterprise. The usage of encryption should always be directly related to business considerations, regulatory requirements, and any additional constraints that the organization may have to address. Different techniques will be used based on the location of data, whether at rest, in transit, or…
Cloud Data Storage: Key Threats
Are you using cloud storage services? If yes, then you need to be aware of these key threats. In the cloud, data storage can be manipulated into unauthorized usage, for example, by account hijacking or uploading illegal content. The multitenancy of cloud storage makes tracking unauthorized usage more challenging. Unauthorized access: Unauthorized access can happen due to…
How Cloud impacts Application Security
This article is intended for software development and IT teams who want to securely build and deploy applications in cloud computing environments, specifically PaaS and IaaS. Cloud computing mostly brings security benefits to applications, but as with most areas of cloud technology, it does require significant changes to existing practices, processes, and technologies that were…
How Cloud impacts Incident Response
The Incident Response (IR) Lifecycle Preparation: “Establishing an incident response capability so that the organization is ready to respond to incidents.” Process to handle the incidents. Handler communications and facilities. Incident analysis hardware and software. Internal documentation (port lists, asset lists, network diagrams, current baselines of network traffic). Identifying training. Evaluating infrastructure by proactive scanning…
QuickGuide: Cloud Incident Response Recommendations
SLAs and setting expectations around what the customer does versus what the provider does are the most important aspects of incident response for cloud-based resources. Clear communication of roles/responsibilities and practicing the response and hand-offs are critical. Cloud customers must set up proper communication paths with the provider that can be utilized in the event of an incident….
QuickGuide: FedRAMP
The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a U.S. government–wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. It is the result of close collaboration with cybersecurity and cloud experts from GSA, NIST, DHS, DOD, NSA, OMB, the Federal CIO Council and its working groups, and…
QuickGuide: Cloud Security Recommendations
Know the infrastructure security of your provider or platform: In the shared security model, the provider (or whoever maintains the private cloud platform) has the burden of ensuring the underlying physical, abstraction, and orchestration layers of the cloud are secure. Review compliance certifications and attestations. Check industry-standard and industry-specific compliance certifications and attestations on a regular basis for having the…
Common Cloud Security Threats
Cloud deployments, whether public, private, hybrid or community, are susceptible to all the traditional cybersecurity threats and more. Let’s look at the most common threats: Virtual machine attacks: Active VMs are vulnerable to all traditional attacks that can affect physical servers. Once a VM is compromised, it may be able to attack other VMs running…