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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The Cloud Security Part 1: For Dummies

cloud security considerationsFrom an attacker’s perspective, cloud providers aggregate access to many victims’ data into a single point of entry. As the cloud environments become more and more popular, they will increasingly become the focus of attacks. Some organizations think that liability can be outsourced, but no, and I hope that we all understand it cannot. The contract with your cloud vendors basically means nothing, the ISVs or should I say the `SaaS providers`  still holds the responsibility, so rather than focusing on contracts and limiting liability in cloud services deals, you should focus on controls and auditability.

“Dropbox, … deceived users about the security ..The FTC complaint charges Dropbox with telling users that their files were totally encrypted” Wired Magazine

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Amazon Outage: Is it a story of a conspiracy?

Last week my Twitter blinked massively by news magazines and cloud blogers that reported on the extraordinary news: “The cloud computing crashed”. Amazon AWS had suffered a major outage in its US East facility. This was the worst in cloud computing’s and Amazon’s history. This failure affected major sites such as Heroku, Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and many more well-known internet services hosted on EC2. From what I read, it seems that automated processes began replicating a large number of EBS volumes, which harmed EBS performance and availability across multiple availability zones in north Virginia region.

“..However badly they’ve been affected, providers have sung Amazon’s praises in recognition of how much it’s helped them run a powerful infrastructure at lower cost and effort.” Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage (ZDNet SaaS Blog)

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5 Amazon AWS Cloud Deployment and Management Tools

Cloud-managementAdopting the cloud  must come with a management solution strategy. Cloud Management refers to all cloud environment aspects and their related tasks. Tasks include deploying, monitoring, analyzing and more. Many IT organizations today running to adopt the new disruptive cloud methodologies. Choosing to run a business on a cloud is a strategic decision, picking the right way to orchestrate your cloud resources should be an integral part of your cloud adoption strategy.
I asked Amazon support:

“I am looking for a tool that will let the ISV’s customers an option to enable an environment by themselves with a back office for its administrator to control the different customer accounts. For example for an e-learning environment that also includes rules such as the total hours enabled for a single formation/cluster that support a few hours class a day”.
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