Practical Cloud Security

Preface

As the title states, this book is a practical guide to securing your cloud environments. In almost all organizations, security has to fight for time and funding, and it often takes a back seat to implementing features and functions. Focusing on the “best bang for the buck,” security-wise, is important.

This book is intended to help you get the most important security controls for your most important assets in place quickly and correctly, whether you’re a security professional who is somewhat new to the cloud, or an architect or developer with security responsibilities. From that solid base, you can continue to build and mature your controls.

While many of the security controls and principles are similar in cloud and on-premises environments, there are some important practical differences. For that reason, a few of the recommendations for practical cloud security may be surprising to those with an on-premises security background. While there are certainly legitimate differences of opinion among security professionals in almost any area of information security, the recommendations in this book stem from years of experience in securing cloud environments, and they are informed by some of the latest developments in cloud computing offerings.

The first few chapters deal with understanding your responsibilities in the cloud and how they differ from in on-premises environments, as well as understanding what assets you have, what the most likely threats are to those assets, and ...