Building the Infrastructure For Cloud Security

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.