Architectures to be implemented
This report aims to provide a detailed discussion of the methods, risks and security issues for the implementation of cloud computing in the business of Smiths Security. The report completes the six tasks that are required for implementing cloud computing in the business structure of the company.
The company Smith Security Ltd. Runs several security businesses all over Australia. The head office of the company is located in Sydney Metro. The company has its data centres in some of the major cities, which are Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth. As the infrastructure of the company has not been modified for a significant time. So, the company is planning on migrating to cloud computing for its benefits. The idea of the company is to increase the flexibility and responsiveness.
The architectures that need to be implemented are:
The workload Distribution Architecture utilises resources of IT that can be easily scaled horizontally by utilising several similar IT resources. This can be achieved by utilising a load balancer, which delivers runtime logic that distributes the workload between the available assets of IT equally (Arora, Parashar & Transforming, 2013). This model is applicable to any resource of IT and it is commonly used with cloud services, cloud storage services, and distributed virtual services. The reason for deploying this architecture is to exercise the benefit of the cloud usage monitor that is involved in executing the runtime tracking of the workload. This architecture is also useful for information processing.
Resource pooling architecture
This architecture is based on the pooling of similar resources of IT into several groups. The pools can be either virtual or physical resources (Dinh et al., 2013). These similar pools are grouped automatically and monitored by the system that ensures the constant synchronisation. The reason for deploying this architecture is to track and synchronise the elements that are required by the resources of IT that are pooled. The monitors of cloud usage are included in this architecture during runtime. Some examples of pools of resources are:
The physical server pools consists of the networked servers that possesses operating systems and other essential applications that are installed and ready to use.
The configuration from pre-chosen templates by any customer is done by the virtual server pools when they are implemented.
The files or block based containers of storage resides in the storage pools (Varia & Mathew, 2014).
The benefits of the presented cloud architecture are:
- Innovative software: immediate updates of the software of cloud provides new functionality and features to the clients and customers.
- Flexible costs: the cost of deploying cloud computing in the business of an enterprise is significantly lower than conventional methods. The company need to invest in the infrastructure and server capacity (Li et al., 2013).
- Availability: the availability of the cloud services is increased using this architecture of cloud computing.
- Mobility improvement: the applications and data are available to the employees of the organisation at all times. With the help of this cloud computing, the mobility of data is increased.
- Developed collaboration: the above recommended architecture of cloud creates an improved collaboration among the employees for interacting virtually and share information effortlessly.
- Scalability: the capacity of cloud for scalable environment is increased with the introduction of this architecture (Amanatullah et al., 2013)
Benefits and issues of the presented cloud architecture
The major issues of the recommended cloud computing architecture are maintaining confidentiality and the integrity of data for assisting in data security. Some of the problems related to cloud computing are:
- Downtime: the major disadvantage of implementing cloud architecture is downtime. As cloud computing systems are based on the internet, the issue of service disruptions are a probability of implementing cloud computing.
- Privacy and security issues: the issue of maintaining the security of data in a business is increased with the implementation of cloud computing. The constant threat of data breaches creates the requirement of implementing proper security measures.
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Risks |
Description of the risks |
Controls to mitigate the risks |
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Lack of encryption |
The transmissions of network are susceptible to eavesdropping or data theft |
Use of cryptographic protocols for shielding the transmissions from indiscriminate attacks |
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Insufficient security risk valuation |
determining and detection of any intrusion cannot be achieved without conducting proper risk management |
Strict assessment and risk prevention must be implemented and the systems of IPS/IDS should monitor the traffic for malicious activities |
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Poor compliance |
the breach in the parameters of compliance between the private cloud and the provider of public cloud |
The coordination of the cloud must be maintained and the demonstration of compliance of both the clouds is required |
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Weak management of security |
The situation in the enterprise when the managers fail to service authentication, management of identity, and procedures of authorisation is weak management of security |
The controls for both the cloud should be replicated and proper synchronisation of the security data should be maintained |
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Deprived data redundancy |
The enterprise and the hybrid cloud is put at risk if there is a lack of redundancy. This security issues rises when there are no redundant copies of data in all the data centres. |
The implementation of redundant copies of data mitigates this issue. The implementation can be done by utilising the multiple data centres that are provided by the cloud provider |
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Failure in identifying and authenticating |
This risk is generated when there is an improper management of security management in the organisation |
The control for this risk is proper monitoring and verification of all permissions for access and synchronisations of data security. |
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Unprotected APIs |
Unprotected endpoints of APIs exposes delicate data to several malicious attacks that can create leak of sensitive data |
The handling of the API keys should be monitored same as encryption and the keys must handled properly by any third party developers. |
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The risk of poor protection of IP creates severe security risks that can damage the network. |
The mitigation method for this threat is manual classification of IP and quantification of risk. |
The most common threats to the cloud of AWS workspace is the issue of data breaches. This issue is a growing concern for the organisation who implement cloud in their organisation. The analysis of this security issue is provided in this section for the company.
The steps and controls that are required to prevent any security breaches are:
- Securely logon the services: The authentication of the users should be strong and secure for preventing any kind of unauthorised access of the desktops by any user where the user can attain sensitive information (Aazam et al. 2014)
- Identity services that are reliable: Nonetheless, the authentication protocol strength is founded in the fundamental approach of identity, and therefore the security of the identity database needs to be ensured.
- Encryption: as the desktop is delivered to the users through the internet, it has to be encrypted for preventing any kind of interception by an unauthorised user.
- Effective management of keys: the keys that are used for encrypting the virtual drives where the desktop resides must be secured with extra security
- Physical security: servers in the data centre of the provider on which the applications actually execute has to be protected from the access by any unauthorised users.
Reason for these steps
These controls are implemented in the security structure of the cloud for controlling the user access who are utilising the resources of cloud. The access of the user can be limited on the resources and the applications from the workspaces of the users. Specific policies need to be made for allowing the specific users the permission of creating and managing the resources for EC2 and Workspaces (Bahrami & Singhal, 2015).
Recommendation to the board
The board is recommended to implement security policies to prevent unauthorised access in the environment of cloud. These policies can be unique individual credentials to all the employees who need access in the cloud. Firewalls can be implemented in the server of the cloud to prevent the access of resources of the cloud by any unauthorised user.
The hybrid cloud implementation is essential to the companies for various aims. Some of the advantages are business reinforcement, disaster retrieval and resilience. The major reason for providing these benefits is agreement of spanning through isolated storages and locally. The enabling of these alternatives are provided by the storing in hybrid cloud. This is caused as the unprotected cloud is utilised intensively for the purpose of backup. Each application retains a distinctive characteristics and requirements of High Availability or HA. AWS provides several infrastructural building blocks for helping the organisation for requirement meeting in methods that are cost efficient. The analysis for high availability that will be carried out for confirming the applications recovery as the needs arises and not just the component recovery would be included in an effective HA strategy (Hwang, Dongarra & Fox, 2013). The recommends, which are required to be involved in the business BCP according to the checklist of Morad and Dalbhanjan are as follows:
- Metrics of Amazon cloudwatch
- Elastic load balancing for balancing the load among numerous areas of availability
- The utilisation of amazon RDS that is Multi-AZ for various areas of databases that are availability achieved
- Instinctive scaling for spontaneous instances or scaling recovery
- Snapshots with Amazon EBS snapshots, which are in the volumes of the Amazon EBS that are point-in-time
- Flexible IP addresses for IP addresses, which are static and can be remapped among the occurrences
- For situation variety of management, the AWS elastic beanstalk can be utilised for the applications
- Utilisation of Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon simpleDB for loading the pairs of key/value
Disaster Recovery and backup
All the applications that are hosted in the cloud of the organisation has a distinct requirement of recovery of disaster that needs to be connected with the purposes of requirements associated to the geographical location of the cloud, recovery points and the recovery time that checks the physical vicinity of the disaster recovery sites. An effective disaster recovery strategy includes the DR type that needs to be included for confirming the expected application restoring. An effective strategy should include strategy of DR that will consist the regional duplication, recovery midst region-wise, administration of the comprehensive traffic or popularly known as load balancing, and maintaining. The techniques and the AWS that needs to be included in the business BCP for implementing an efficient strategy of DR:
- Utilise Amazon glacier for archiving data
- execute extra instances, Amazon Machine images, or achieve data in the areas of multiple AWS
- the utilisation of database of shipping log for influencing the technologies of asynchronous redundancy of data (Pino & Di Salvo, 2013)
- The Amazon Route 53 is utilised in the situation of regional failover that is DNS based
- For regaining easily from a data loss, the undertaking of the third-party tools or the periodic snapshots of Amazon EBS can be utilised
- The reserved instances of Amazon EC2 is helps in reserving the capacity of DR in an isolated location
- Exploitation of AMI (Amazon Machine Image) and EBS snapshot copy through several regions
Risk associated with hybrid cloud strategy
The backup recommends that needs to be considered are:
- Microsoft SQL server 2008 R2, which is RDBMS in the cloud
- In order to provide more safety to the stockpiled data in the cloud, a control is provided to the versioning of Amazon S3
- Designing Fault tolerant application in the cloud
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The understanding of which Amazon EBS instances is supported versus the instances that are store-backed is done and the most suitable storage type is chosen purposely and get the understanding of the results of data determination, recovery and backup. |
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Dynamic IP addressing of AWS is understood and it has been ensured that the application will operate when the components of the applications are restarted |
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The deployment of the acute components of the applications across zones of several availability, those are suitably duplicating the data among the zones, and it has been tested how the failure within the components affects the availability of application. |
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The understanding of how the failover will take place through the deployed components of application in the multiple zones of availability and they are utilising Elastic load balancing or third party and the elastic IP addresses wherever suitable. |
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The utilisation of the suitable credentials is done for accessing the user account of the operating system and they are not involved in the key pairing of private key of the AWS instance with each administrators of the system. |
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The utilisation of the CNAME records is executed for mapping the DNS name of the Elastic load balancing or the buckets of Amazon S3. |
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Before the sharing of the images of Amazon machine with others is done, the removal of all the confidential and sensitive information that includes embedded private/public key pairs of instance is done and the reviewing of all the files of SSH authorised keys is done. |
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The signing up of the production accounts of AWS for the enterprise or business support is done and the plan to incorporate reports of trusted advisor of AWS into the ongoing reviews of operation is done. |
The AWS RDS database is the service of distributed relational database by the AWS. It is based on the services that are running inside the cloud, which are designed for simplifying the operation, setup, and the scaling of the relational database to utilise in the applications.
The features of Amazon RDS are:
- Deployment in the Multi-AZ (Availability Zone) allows the automatic provision and the maintenance of a synchronous logical or physical standby, which depends on the engine of database in various AZ (Zhou et al., 2013).
- Read replicas permits the several uses case like scaling out of the workloads that are read-heavy.
- Metrics of performance and monitoring for the RDS of Amazon that is available on the management console of the AWS or the API of Amazon cloudwatch. Amazon provides a possible feature of enhanced monitoring that offers metrics set that are expanded for the MySQL (Sharkh et al., 2013).
- RDS costs is effectively less. The instances of Amazon RDS are similarly priced to the Amazon EC2. The benefits of RDS are hourly charged and it is available in two packages, such as instances of on-demand DB and the instances of Reserved DB. The users are indicted for the storage amount that is provisioned, the transfer of data and the input and output operations that are performed.
The benefits of the cloud service of AWS needs to be exercised. Some of the benefits of the services of AWS are:
- Simplified storage service: This consists the archiving of data and application programs and the online backup. The service is significantly cheaper, scalable and high speed.
- CloudDrive: this allows the users to utilise the devices that are connected to the web for accessing and uploading files. The streaming of music is also possible in this drive.
- RedShift: This service is specifically designed to analyse the workloads that are connected to the tools of business intelligence and the standard clients that are SQL based. This service is a service of data warehouse, which can handle data that is petabyte-scale (Kumar et al., 2014).
- CloudSearch: This is used for integrating the search capabilities that are customised and it is scalable search service.
- Mechanical Turk: This allows the developers to integrate human intelligence into the remote procedure calls. It is an API, which can utilise the network of human for executing tasks that a computer is incapable of performing (Sareen, 2013).
- Dynamo Database: This is a noSQL database, that is fully controlled and popular for its feature of scalability and low invisibilities.
Issues of AWS are:
- The service limits of AWS: the service limits of AWS are set by platform. These limits are set for ensuring the security of the cloud storage and the files on the cloud database.
- Technological limitations: the growth of technology demands the updated services to the customers. The cloud storage of AWS cannot perform at the expectation of the users. It is not feasible to send several emails or files per second but with the development of technology it can be possible (Rewagad & Pawar, 2013).
- Security issues: during data storing in cloud, serious challenges of data theft can be encountered. Even though the cloud storage is equipped with proper security measures, but still it is vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
- Low bandwidth: When users are accessing the cloud, the users can encounter the problem of low bandwidth due to the entry of several users at the same time in the cloud storage.
- Flexibility issues: The services of cloud performs on the remote servers that makes it difficult for several companies in having control over the hardware and software. The consistency of the services fluctuates.
- Compatibility issues: As the entire infrastructure is virtualised, the issues of compatibility arises at several times that consists serious challenges creating obstacles in smooth functioning of the services.
Conclusion
Therefore, it can be concluded that the migration of the company to hybrid cloud storage creates several opportunities of business growth. The architectures that need to be implemented are workload distribution architecture and resource pooling architecture. The benefits of the cloud architectures are Innovative software are flexible costs, availability, mobility improvement, developed collaboration, and scalability. The information security steps and controls are access administration controls and effective identity, regular data encryption, protection of APIs, collection and utilisation of security logs, responsibility of managing the cloud, utilisation of optimised solutions for data security, controls of deployment in cloud and centralisation of governance, and understanding of the vulnerabilities.
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