Explain security architecture design for cloud computing./ Explain the design principles of cloud information security.

 SECURITY ARCHITECTURE DESIGN

Processes such as enterprise authentication and authorization, access control, confidentiality, integrity, repudiation, security management, etc. should be considered when developing a security architecture framework, as should operational procedures, technology specifications, people and organizational management, and security program compliance and reporting. To fulfill business objectives, a security architecture document should be created that defines security and privacy standards. Asset classification and control, physical security, system access restrictions, network and computer administration, application development and maintenance, business continuity, and compliance all necessitate documentation. A design and implementation program that includes a business case, requirements definition, design, and implementation strategies should be linked with the formal system development life cycle. Technological and design approaches, as well as the security processes required to deliver the following services across all technology levels, should be included in the security architecture.

1. Authentication
2. Authorization
3. Availability
4. Confidentiality 
5. Integrity
6. Accountability
7. Privacy

The development of a secure architecture gives engineers, data center operations staff, and network operations staff a standardized blueprint for designing, building, and testing the security of applications and systems. Design reviews of new modifications may be more effectively examined against this architecture to ensure that they adhere to the principles outlined in the architecture, allowing for more consistent and effective design reviews.

VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT

Vulnerability assessment categorizes network assets to better prioritize vulnerability-mitigation initiatives such as patching and system upgrades. It assesses the success of risk mitigation by establishing objectives such as reduced vulnerability exposure and faster mitigation. To close vulnerabilities before they may be exploited, vulnerability management should be linked with discovery, patch management, and upgrade management procedures.

Data Privacy

A risk assessment, as well as a gap analysis of controls and processes, must be conducted. Formal privacy processes and activities must be defined, maintained, and perpetuated based on this data. Privacy control and protection, like security, must be incorporated into the secure architectural design. Depending on the size of the business and the scope of activities, an individual or a team should be allocated and charged with safeguarding privacy. To handle data privacy issues and concerns, a member of the security team responsible for the privacy or a corporate security compliance team should engage with the business legal team. Typically, the security compliance team, if one exists at all, will lack formalized data privacy training, limiting the organization's capacity to effectively handle the data privacy concerns it already faces and will be repeatedly challenged in the future. The solution is to employ a consultant in this field, a Privacy specialist, or have one of your current staff members adequately taught. This ensures that your firm is ready to satisfy the data privacy requirement of its customers and regulators.

DATA SECURITY

Data-level security is the ultimate difficulty in cloud computing because sensitive data is the province of the organization, not the cloud computing provider. Enterprises will need to bring security to the data level to ensure that their data is secure wherever it travels. For example, using data-level security, the company can indicate that this data is not permitted to leave the United States. It can also compel the encryption of particular types of data and restrict access to the data to only specific people.

APPLICATION SECURITY

One of the crucial success elements for a world-class SaaS firm is application security. The security features and requirements are defined here, and the application security test results are examined. Application security methods, secure coding rules, training, and testing scripts and tools are often developed together by the security and development teams. Although product engineering will most likely focus on the application layer, the application's security design, and the infrastructure layers that interact with the application, the security team should give the security requirements for the product development engineers to implement.

The security and product development teams should work together on this. For application source code reviews, external penetration testers are utilized, and attack and penetration tests give an examination of the program's security as well as assurance to clients that attack and penetration tests are done regularly. Collaboration on application security that is fragmented and undefined might result in lower-quality design, development, and testing results.

Because many connections between businesses and their SaaS providers are made via the web, providers should secure their web applications in the cloud by following Open Web Application Security Project guidelines for secure application development and locking down ports and unnecessary commands on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) stacks, just as they would on-premises. LAMP stands for Linux as the operating system, Apache as the web server, MySQL as the relational database management system RDBMS, and PHP as the object-oriented scripting language. PHP is frequently replaced with Perl or Python.

VIRTUAL MACHINE SECURITY

Physical servers in the cloud are aggregated to numerous virtual machine instances on virtualized servers. Data center security teams may not only duplicate conventional security policies for the data center as a whole to safeguard virtual machines, but they can also advise their clients on how to prepare machines for transfer to a cloud environment when suitable. Firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, these integrity monitoring, and log inspection may all be implemented as software on virtual machines to boost server and application protection and compliance integrity when virtual resources migrate from on-premises to public cloud settings. By applying this conventional line of protection to the virtual machine itself, you can safeguard the migration of essential programs and data to the cloud. To enable centralized management of a server firewall policy, the security software loaded onto a virtual machine should include a bidirectional stateful firewall that enables virtual machine isolation and location awareness, allowing for tighter policy and the flexibility to move the virtual machine from on-premises to cloud resources. At the virtual machine level, integrity monitoring and log inspection software must be used. As a significant approach to virtual machine security, the software can be put into a single software agent that provides consistent control and management throughout the cloud while seamlessly integrating back into existing security infrastructure investments, providing economies of scale, deployment, and cost savings.