Security measures to deploy for protecting MS SQL Server in IaaS cloud
a. Description of the type of security that would protect the database
The regional retailer named as Webb Stores, food staff delivering company serves their services in Australia and New Zealand as well. Apart from certain food staffs it also offers some specialty items to the consumers of Australia and New Zealand as well. As the company offers online services to the consumer and it has two different data centers in Melbourne and Sydney thus the data management approach of the company is becoming difficult to them. Currently the company uses MS SQL Server 2012, R2 database for managing information but it is not standing beneficial for the service providers. Therefore, in order to mitigate the issues of data management the company is planning for migrate their platform from the existing one to the Cloud IaaS platform.
The cloud platform is more secured than the traditional Information technology based platforms. For a specific data server or data storage the security needs are different. If any kind of data managerial level challenges occurs then that could be identified and mitigated sooner through cloud features (Kamateri et al., 2013). It has encryption mechanism and with the help if the encryption mechanism none of the external users will be able to access data from the server without proper decryption keys. In addition to this, other security measures associated to the cloud platform are authentication and security application firewall (Razali et al., 2014). With the help of the firewall none of the unwanted external users will be able to access data from the server.
b. Describe the benefits and issues that would be the result of the deployment for these security measures
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Benefits |
Risks |
|
Lower capital cost: With the help of the large scale computing resources the cloud service providers will be able to unique service to the consumers (Jamshidi, Pahl Chinenyeze & Liu, 2015). |
Environmental security: The rate of security level threats increases with the adoption of cloud based platform. The virus, malware, Brute force attacks and DOS attacks took place much with the usage of the cloud platform. |
|
Lower IT operation costs: Cloud provides flexibility to the consumers for hosting the virtual IT infrastructure |
Data privacy and security: If the internet connectivity gets lost then, risks might occur. The control over the data also gets reduced after the cloud based platform (Wood et al., 2015) |
|
No maintenance cost: The cost for the maintenance of software and hardware are required |
Record retention: The record storage operation of loud is not that mush secured. |
|
Optimized IT infrastructure: The IT infrastructure gives immediate access that is required for serving the computing services (Chen et al., 2015) |
Disaster recovery: If any of the information gets lost from the server then even though that could not be accessed but still the access approach is not at all easier. |
a. The database
- Excessive Privilege
- Privilege abuse
- Database injection attack
- Malware attack (Ding, Chao & Yang, 2016)
- Exploitation of vulnerable information
- Unmanageable sensitive information
- Different human attacks
- Multilayered security solution
b. The IaaS infrastructure
- Most expensive
- The consumers are responsible for the data backup
- For VM management the consumers are responsible
- No control over the server is available (Chae et al., 2014)
c. The communication between the Webb Store and their IaaS database in the cloud
If proper communication is not established then the service providers will fail to transmit information to the destination easily (Jiang, et al., 2014).
a. Risks and issues associated to backing up data to the cloud
i. Back-up data to cloud
The cloud computing system does not have limited storage capacity. Thus, the users of the system could store the information as a backup in the storage (Wang et al., 2016). Though, data could be stored in terms of also backup but still it is little difficult to access the information from backup server.
ii. Storage of data to cloud
If the information are stored in the server and proper encryption algorithm are not used then the external users can easily come and access the information from the server (Kamateri et al., 2013).
iii. Retrieval of data to cloud
The data retrieval ability must be available to a specific group of people and if it is not specified then, anybody will get the opportunity to retrieve information from the cloud server.
Benefits and risks resulting from the deployment of security measures
For the cloud based solution disaster recovery is not at all a proper solution and before its implementation within a firm its shortcomings and challenges are required to be understood by the management authority of Webb Stores (Shiraz & Gani, 2014). No single approach for disaster recovery is there and based on the type of business each business has different DR planning. For Webb Store the most suitable cloud based solution is the replication of virtual machines in the cloud (Kamateri et al., 2013). The replicas of the files or information are stored in the replicated virtual machine. It gives continuous data protection at the same time.
a. The IaaS infrastructure
As Webb Store is currently willing to move their data management platform to IaaS cloud based one thus, the IaaS platform can be kept secured from the secured attackers with the help of the followings:
- Regular update scheduling of the updates software
- Adoption of proper patching procedure
- Understanding the details requirements for audit and monitoring
- Regular testing and vulnerability analysis of the IaaS platform
- Data encryption (Razali et al., 2014)
- Access control system
b. The MS SQL Server 2012, R2 cloud instance
In order to secure the information stored in the data server, it is necessary to consider the following:
- Platform and the network security including the physical security, operating system security, and database object security
- Application level security
- SQL server security tools and utilities as well
- Data encryption and certification
c. The cloud network infrastructure
Proper controls over the stored information in the data server are required, so that none of the external users could come and access information from the server (Jamshidi, Pahl Chinenyeze & Liu, 2015).. The network through which the information will be transferred should be encrypted so that none of the external users could access the confidential information from the server. In addition to this, another important factor that should be considered includes database monitoring technology and usage of SIEM tools (Shiraz & Gani, 2014). With the proper network access control system the unauthorized users will not be able to access information from the server where Webb Stores their confidential information.
d. The cloud backup and restore infrastructure
- The backup and restore ability of IaaS infrastructure will protect information automatically without the requirement of costly on site hardware as well as administrative overhead.
- With the help of Multi region public cloud the data recovery could be enabled through reliability, durability, fastest and cost effectiveness (Jamshidi, Pahl Chinenyeze & Liu, 2015).
- The information would be entirely encrypted in the transmission level with no such vendor access possibility
- The virtual machines can be easily pushed towards any direction or in any global direction (Razali et al., 2014)
- In order to store the replicate virtual machines again the IaaS cloud platform is very much helpful
- As the information are stored in the cloud thus those are ready for data mining, legal and compliances requirements (Chae et al., 2014).
References
Chae, D., Kim, J., Kim, J., Kim, J., Yang, S., Cho, Y., … & Paek, Y. (2014, May). CMcloud: Cloud platform for cost-effective offloading of mobile applications. In Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid), 2014 14th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on (pp. 434-444). IEEE.
Chen, G., Guo, H., Zhang, D., Zhu, Y., Wang, C., Yu, H., … & Yoshikane, N. (2015, June). First demonstration of holistically-organized metro-embedded cloud platform with all-optical interconnections for virtual datacenter provisioning. In Opto-Electronics and Communications Conference (OECC), 2015(pp. 1-3). IEEE.
Ding, J., Chao, H., & Yang, M. (2016, June). Real-time logo recognition from live video streams using an elastic cloud platform. In International Conference on Web-Age Information Management (pp. 469-480). Springer, Cham.
Jamshidi, P., Pahl, C., Chinenyeze, S., & Liu, X. (2015). Cloud migration patterns: a multi-cloud service architecture perspective. In Service-Oriented Computing-ICSOC 2014 Workshops (pp. 6-19). Springer, Cham.
Jamshidi, P., Pahl, C., Chinenyeze, S., & Liu, X. (2015). Cloud migration patterns: a multi-cloud service architecture perspective. In Service-Oriented Computing-ICSOC 2014 Workshops (pp. 6-19). Springer, Cham.
Jiang, L., Da Xu, L., Cai, H., Jiang, Z., Bu, F., & Xu, B. (2014). An IoT-oriented data storage framework in cloud computing platform. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 10(2), 1443-1451.
Kamateri, E., Loutas, N., Zeginis, D., Ahtes, J., D’Andria, F., Bocconi, S., … & Tarabanis, K. A. (2013, September). Cloud4soa: A semantic-interoperability paas solution for multi-cloud platform management and portability. In European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing (pp. 64-78). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Razali, R. A. M., Ab Rahman, R., Zaini, N., & Samad, M. (2014, June). Virtual machine migration implementation in load balancing for Cloud computing. In Intelligent and Advanced Systems (ICIAS), 2014 5th International Conference on (pp. 1-4). IEEE.
Shiraz, M., & Gani, A. (2014). A lightweight active service migration framework for computational offloading in mobile cloud computing. The Journal of Supercomputing, 68(2), 978-995.
Wang, F., Liu, J., Chen, M., & Wang, H. (2016). Migration towards cloud-assisted live media streaming. IEEE/ACM Transactions on networking, 24(1), 272-282.
Wood, T., Ramakrishnan, K. K., Shenoy, P., Van der Merwe, J., Hwang, J., Liu, G., & Chaufournier, L. (2015). CloudNet: Dynamic pooling of cloud resources by live WAN migration of virtual machines. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), 23(5), 1568-1583.
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