In my previous article, I have talked about all that you need to know about Cyber Attacks. In this article, I will be presenting a comprehensive guide about Cloud Computing. Follow me as we will look at this together in this article.
Only a few people understand what cloud computing is all about. Traditionally, companies and organisations purchased computers and applications needed to run their business.
These computers are located in organisations and are managed by their employees. These applications are stored in more than one computer and organisations need experts to keep them running, this is becoming too expensive for organisations to sustain.
The organisations do not want to discard it because it increases productivity and raises competitive advantage. The organisations now noticed that it is not all the computers that are working at the same time.
The bottom line is that there are many wasted resources. This is what led to the development of a new model called virtualization which allows only one computer to do what many computers would have done. This process consolidates workloads into fewer servers.
Virtualisation…
This ultimately increases utilisation and saves money. This is why many data centres were transformed from the assembly of many computers to a virtualised environment.
With time, we now have entrepreneurs who build a large data centre and offer to rent it out to businesses. They allow customers to run their virtualized applications instead of general hardware. That was how the cloud is born.
This is often referred to as Infrastructure as a Service. (IaaS). There are different varieties of IaaS. Some offer up the infrastructure to run applications with managed applications like Databases and the customer does not need to maintain or configure applications themselves. This is known as SaaS. If you are using Gmail for example, you are enjoying SaaS.
Platform as a Service
This is between IaaS and SaaS. This happens when the software provider manager more of the infrastructure such as OS Patching.
Many organisations love this because they do not have to bother about the cost of maintaining the software. When it comes to security in cloud computing, it is a shared responsibility where both cloud providers and application owners have a role to play.
It is designed in layers and it includes both the physical and logical components. The cloud infrastructure provided by IaaS vendors is protected in various ways. From an availability point of view, the infrastructure is designed to be highly available.
Therefore, infrastructure uptime is the responsibility of the vendor. From the security point of view, the vendor secures the infrastructure, and you have to worry about the security of your applications. You are to secure access, network traffic and data applications.
Most vendors supply some forms of security for applications. But these tools provided have limited applications. It only provides the basic security for applications that are not extensive enough.
These tools are also used to secure the underlying applications for the infrastructure. If attackers can bypass the infrastructure layer, they can also bypass it at the customer layer as well. There are many organizations that operate a hybrid platform where their applications are scattered across many IaaS vendors.
This multi-vendor platform also comes with multiple challenges. They are independent, uncoordinated security solutions. The problem tends to increase geometrically based on the number of vendors involved. The problem becomes difficult because there are limited trained personnel that can manage such a situation.
Fortinet products
Fortinet has several solutions to solve this complexity that comes with multiple vendors. Some of these solutions include Fortigate, Fortimail, Fortiweb, and Forti Sandbox, among other solutions. They provide the same security and can work with multiple data centres.
They are optimised for all the leading IaaS cloud providers such as Amazon, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, VMWare, IBM among others.
Action Point
PS: I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article or disagree with some of the issues raised.
Please share your thoughts on the topic discussed. We would appreciate it if you could drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.
