How secure is your cloud?

As Cloud computing becomes more popular and many businesses are keen to adopt it,one of their major concerns is security. In spite of the hype accompanying it and the success stories from the large organisations who have adopted, there are also numerous examples of breaches that have been experienced in the cloud. Many businesses would like to know how to create a secure cloud infrastructure to ensure that all their applications and data is well protected.

This talk is based on my experience in different projects that I have been involved in, some pitfalls that my team has fallen into and considerations that we can take while preparing for new cloud infrastructure.

This talk is not about a particular cloud vendor solutions but about the questions and considerations to take to ensure that your cloud infrastructure is secure.

The considerations include:

1. Ensuring data is securely protected from anyone who would want to access it.

2. Encrypting the data so that if it got to the wrong people

3. Authentication to ensure that only the authorised people can access the data

4. Enabling due diligence so that data is not accessible by those who eavesdrop and would like to modify it.

5. Protecting the infrastructure from Denial of Service attacks(DOS) from both internal and external sources

This talk also highlights some common pitfalls:

1. Using components for a different purpose other that what it is created to for.

2. Waiting till after the application is built before preparing the infrastructure.

3. Creating the infrastructure then thinking about the security at the last minute.

At the end of this session, attendees:

1. Are able to evaluate the level of security that they need

2. Can reorganise their priority while designing for their cloud infrastructure

3. Are equipped to create a highly secure infrastructure