Secure Your Cloud Building Blocks: Overview and a Few Tips

AWS Cloud Security TipsThe cloud enables great agility and can reduce costs if used right. But does it also manage risk? In fact, the cloud contains the same traditional hosting risks as well as specific related risks to your production environment running on the cloud.
With IaaS dynamic environment you pay only for what you use enabling alignment with actual real-time demand. The cloud instance is a temporary resource that is created from a gold master image automatically and on demand. This basic cloud automation capability makes traditional patching redundant and fast provisioning extremely easy. It is an important consideration that changes some basic security deployment perceptions when moving from traditional infrastructure to the cloud.
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Consumption, Utilization and Elasticity: Cloud Basics

newvem cloud utilization heatmap
Cloud Utilization Heatmap by Newvem

Lets start with a basic scenario where there is a sudden peak in the demand for an application service as the amount of clients’ requests increase. This event leads to a direct and immediate impact on the load placed on the web servers that host the service. In the traditional world, the number of servers is fixed, therefore an overload adversely affects the application performance and the service may slow down or even be terminated. The IT team would want to restore the environment functionality and bring the service up as soon as possible. The immediate impact  of such an event on the business can be devastating. Starting with this simple understanding, we can move into the world of cloud computing use including resources consumption, while relating to the key differences between the traditional data center and today’s cloud technologies.
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The IaaS Management Market: Evolution, Vendors and More

A lot has already been said about the false cloud use where the IaaS platform utilized as an hosting extension of the IT organization’s data center and not taking advantage of the elasticity benefits to generate a cost effective and scalable IT operation. Using the public IaaS whether it is Amazon, Rackspace or any other vendor means using a highly dynamic environment which presents an increasing complexity hence loss of control. Checking the list below I can say that cloud (including all its layers IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) control basically contains the same aspects as the good old system management.

What is “System management” ?
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