Security Steps and Controls for Hybrid Cloud
1.Describe the general Information Security steps and controls that you would recommend to the Board to secure the Hybrid Cloud. You will need to explain to the Board your reasons for recommending these particular security steps.
2.Discuss briefly what you would recommend should be included in Regional Gardens’s BCP as a result of their adoption of a Hybrid Cloud and Microservices approach. You will need to consider, as a minimum, the issues of application resilience, backup and disaster recovery in a Hybrid Cloud environment.
Regional Gardens Ltd. is one of the most popular organizations that is running several inter related gardening enterprises. They comprise of a larger display garden and it opens for the purpose of several times in a year (Taddeo, 2013). This particular organization has planned to retain the data centre of Bathurst for storing their data. Regional Gardens Ltd thus requires to move all of their infrastructures to the cloud. The web services are to be moved to the cloud for providing an incremented level of High Availability. It would also provide flexibility to these services for data supply to all the employees and customers. The Micro Services model would be helpful in this case (Von Solms & Van Niekerk, 2013). They have decided to move their data to the hybrid cloud.
There are various risks that are related to this Micro services model and hybrid cloud. The most significant risks to this model and hybrid cloud are hijacking of accounts, data breaching, insider threats, malware injection, insecure application programming interface or API, denial of service attacks, abuse of cloud services and many more (Cavelty, 2014). All of these risks are required to be mitigated for the successful operation within the cloud. These mitigation strategies are mere security steps for the reduction of all these risks.
The various information security steps and controls for the proper reduction of any type of security risk to the hybrid cloud and Micro Services model are given below:
Passwords: The first and the foremost security control that would be helpful for the Regional Gardens Ltd is incorporation of passwords (Wells et al., 2014). A password is any word or specific string of various characters that is utilized for the purpose of user authentication and hence proving the access approval for gaining access to the resources. Passwords would be extremely important and effective for the organization, since the authenticity would be properly maintained.
Passwords
Secured Browser: The second important security control for Regional Gardens Ltd is the secured browser. The browser that is being utilized by them should be secured (Anwar & Mahmood, 2014). Any type of safe and secured browser restricts or blocks the entry of spam or virus to the organizational network and hence the hacker does not get the access to the data.
Access Control: The third significant and important security control for the organization of Regional Gardens Ltd is controlling of the access. This would stop the users from entering into the cloud and thus the authenticity would be maintained.
Antivirus: This is the most basic security measure for any type of cloud. Antivirus is the typical software program that is utilized for preventing, detecting as well as removal of malware (Elmaghraby & Losavio, 2014). The computer viruses are easily detected with the help of this software program. Moreover, the Trojan horses are also removed by this software easily and promptly.
Popup Blocking: The next significant security measure is popup blocking. It is the specific software that helps to block or restrict the popup windows and hence confidential information could not be hacked as well as intruded. Hence phishing is easily stopped.
Encryption: Encryption is considered as one of the most effective security control. It helps to secure the data or information within any system (Dinh et al., 2013). It is the significant procedure of encoding the confidential text or message to a cipher text in the method, which would only allow the receiver in accessing the text or message. This is considered as the most popular and efficient for Regional Gardens. This particular organization should implement this security measure in their business. It is nearly impossible to crack the cipher text and can only be done with the help of decryption. Only the authorized recipient has the ability in easily decrypting the specific message with a key that is being provided by the sender and recipients. This eventually restricts the entry to the authorized and authenticated data within the cloud. There are specifically two types of algorithms. They are symmetric key algorithm and asymmetric key algorithm (Arora, Parashar & Transforming, 2013). The symmetric key algorithm helps to restrict the data and the data can be retrieved with only one key, i.e. only one key is required for encryption and the same key is used for decryption. The asymmetric key algorithm restricts the data with the help of two keys. One of the key is used for encryption and the other key is used for decryption.
Secured Browser
Firewalls: Firewalls is the network security system, which significantly monitors or controls the incoming as well as outgoing traffic of network that is based on the previously determined security rules (Fernando, Loke & Rahayu, 2013). The firewall is the specific barrier between the trusted internal and the un-trusted external networks like Internet connection. Regional Gardens Ltd should implement a proper firewall within their hybrid cloud and thus their security would be checked.
Digital Authentication: It is the significant process by which authentication is introduced with the help of an electronic signature. This provides evidence to the data received with the help of electronic signature and the authenticity would be maintained properly. Identity theft and frauds are easily identified in this process (Garg, Versteeg & Buyya, 2013). Regional Gardens Ltd can easily secure their hybrid cloud with the implementation of digital authentication.
Regulatory Compliance: One of the most significant security controls is the implementation of regulatory compliance. It is the specification or policy that helps in achieving the efforts to ensure that all the employees of the company are maintaining the rules.
Involving Virtual Private Network: The proper implementation of VPN or virtual private network would again be one of the most important and significant method of restricting the data and securing the information of the Regional Gardens Ltd (Taddeo, 2013). It is a private network within a public network that helps to send and receive data. Man in the middle attacks is easily prevented by this particular security measure or control.
All the above mentioned security controls or measures would be extremely helpful for the organization of Regional Gardens Ltd for securing their hybrid cloud and confidential information.
The business continuity planning or BCP refers to the creation of the specific strategy with the proper recognition of various risks or threats that are faced by a company with the assurance that the assets and personnel are secured and have the ability in functioning for disasters (Wells et al., 2014). The business continuity planning explicitly includes various significant risks that would determine how all those risks and threats would be affecting the operations of the organization. Moreover, several safeguards would be implemented and processes would be designed for mitigating each and every risk. This results after testing all the processes for ensuring the fact that the processes are reviewed for making them up to date.
The Regional Gardens Ltd should develop a specific business continuity planning for their business. All the disasters can eventually lead to the failure of the system completely. There are several issues of the application resilience, backup and DR or disaster recovery within the hybrid cloud environment (Fernando, Loke & Rahayu, 2013). The business continuity planning of the Regional Gardens Ltd for the adoption of the hybrid cloud and Micro services model should have the following steps:
Access Control
The first step of the business continuity planning or BCP is the conduction of the business impact analysis for the proper identification of time sensitive and various critical business operations or processes as well as the resources, which would be supporting these processes (Elmaghraby & Losavio, 2014).
The second significant step of the business continuity planning or BCP is the identification, documentation and finally implementation of various security measures for the successful recovery of the business processes and functions.
The next important step in the business continuity planning for Regional Gardens Ltd is the proper organization of a business continuity team and hence compiling the business continuity plan for the proper management of business disruption.
The final vital step in the business continuity planning for Regional Gardens Ltd is the conduction of training for the business continuity team and hence testing or exercising for evaluation of strategies as well as the planning (Garg, Versteeg & Buyya, 2013).
There are several issues related to the application resilience, backup and disaster recovery within the environment of hybrid cloud. These issues are as follows:
Slower Adoption of Cloud: This is the most important issue in application resilience, backup and disaster recovery. The adoption to the cloud is much slower than usual and hence data protection is highly challenged (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). The traditional storage target is often limited and thus this issue is to be mitigated. BCP can easily resolve the issue without much complexity by segregating the cloud activities.
Slower Recoveries: This is another significant issue related to backup and recovery is slower recovery of data. BCP is helpful in this case, since various security measures are present within the planning and thus makes the hybrid cloud absolutely safe and secured.
Reliability: Another issue related to application resilience is reliability (Hashizume et al., 2013). Due to the presence of various security measures and since the strategies are evaluated properly, the reliability of the cloud is extremely high and could be easily checked with the help of this planning.
References
Anwar, A., & Mahmood, A. N. (2014). Cyber security of smart grid infrastructure. arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.3936.
Arora, R., Parashar, A., & Transforming, C. C. I. (2013). Secure user data in cloud computing using encryption algorithms. International journal of engineering research and applications, 3(4), 1922-1926.
Cavelty, M. D. (2014). Breaking the cyber-security dilemma: Aligning security needs and removing vulnerabilities. Science and Engineering Ethics, 20(3), 701-715.
Dinh, H. T., Lee, C., Niyato, D., & Wang, P. (2013). A survey of mobile cloud computing: architecture, applications, and approaches. Wireless communications and mobile computing, 13(18), 1587-1611.
Elmaghraby, A. S., & Losavio, M. M. (2014). Cyber security challenges in Smart Cities: Safety, security and privacy. Journal of advanced research, 5(4), 491-497.
Fernando, N., Loke, S. W., & Rahayu, W. (2013). Mobile cloud computing: A survey. Future generation computer systems, 29(1), 84-106.
Garg, S. K., Versteeg, S., & Buyya, R. (2013). A framework for ranking of cloud computing services. Future Generation Computer Systems, 29(4), 1012-1023.
Hashizume, K., Rosado, D. G., Fernández-Medina, E., & Fernandez, E. B. (2013). An analysis of security issues for cloud computing. Journal of internet services and applications, 4(1), 5.
Rittinghouse, J. W., & Ransome, J. F. (2016). Cloud computing: implementation, management, and security. CRC press.
Taddeo, M. (2013). Cyber security and individual rights, striking the right balance.
Von Solms, R., & Van Niekerk, J. (2013). From information security to cyber security. computers & security, 38, 97-102.
Wells, L. J., Camelio, J. A., Williams, C. B., & White, J. (2014). Cyber-physical security challenges in manufacturing systems. Manufacturing Letters, 2(2), 74-77
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