Six simple cloud security policies you need to know

Source – techtarget.com

For a lot of cloud security breaches, the problem isn’t with the household-name cloud providers, but with you, the ops admin.

The IT operations team often overlooks cloud security policies and best practices when it implements workloads on top-tier public cloud providers. The most common example is an inability to secure Amazon Simple Storage Service buckets. The cost to fix a breach — and the damage done to a high-profile brand due to the breach — far outweigh the time it would have taken to implement proper precautions.

There’s no magic formula for the administrator to shore up defenses outside the corporate data center, but this cloud security checklist supports a layered approach. As a bonus, most of the items on the checklist are standard offerings from major cloud providers.

1. Secure cloud accounts and create groups
Ensure that the root account is secure. To make daily administration easier and still adhere to cloud security policies, create an administrative group and assign rights to that group, rather than the individual.

Create additional groups for fine-grained security that fits with your organization. Some users need read-only access, as for people or services that run reports. Other users should be able to do some ops tasks, such as restart VMs, but not be able to modify VMs or their resources. Cloud providers make roles available to users, and the cloud admin should research when and where to use them. Do not modify existing roles, as this is a recipe for disaster: Copy them instead.

To disable an account temporarily, create a no-access policy. Apply that policy to the administrator or other accounts, then simply remove it to re-enable the account as it was, without risk of unintended changes.

2. Check for free security upgrades
Every major cloud provider allows and encourages the use of two-factor authentication (2FA). There is no reason not to have 2FA on your cloud security checklist for new deployments, as it increases protection from malicious login attempts.

5. Replace passwords with keys
Passwords are a liability: cumbersome, insecure and easy to forget. Every seasoned administrator knows that Monday morning user-has-forgotten-password scenario.

Make public key infrastructure (PKI) part of your cloud security policies. PKI relies on a public and private key to verify the identity of a user before exchanging data. Switch the cloud environment to PKI, and password-stealing becomes a non-issue. PKI also prevents brute force login attacks. Without the private key, no one will obtain access, barring a catastrophic PKI code failure.

While this might seem obvious, include a note on the cloud security checklist that the private key should not be stored on the computer or laptop in use. Investigate vendors, such as YubiKey, that provide secure key management. For some programs, the user has to touch the device. Cloud key management for multiple users is easier with these tools.

All the major public cloud providers offer a PKI. If you prefer to use your own keys, make sure they are kept safe with a good, secure password. That means if you lose the USB key/storage medium holding the key, you have a certain level of security that will give you time to replace the lost key.

6. Turn on auditing and system monitoring
A lot of administrators don’t think about monitoring until it’s too late. Systems create logs in huge amounts. Use tools that capture, scan and process these logs into something useful for cloud capacity planning, audits, troubleshooting and other operations.