By CIOReview | Monday, September 23, 2024

In the IaaS model, cloud security is applied in a shared responsibility model. This, by default, means that most of the responsibility rests with the cloud provider for securing the infrastructure and any managed elements of the environment. In turn, it falls to the cloud customer to ensure its workloads, applications, and data.

Fremont, CA: IaaS offers virtualized computing resources, virtual networks, and virtual storage over the Internet. Among the widely adopted IaaS services are Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine (GCE).

Although IaaS has attracted the attention of most organizations because of several critical benefits, such as its low upfront cost, which doesn't require organizations to purchase or maintain hardware, it is more scalable and flexible than supporting an on-premise data center. Cloud infrastructure can expand on demand and scale down once it is no longer needed. It never overprovisions resources for peak demand—a temporary phenomenon.

Some of the security issues and challenges to be considered before and after IaaS implementation are as follows:

Limited Control

IaaS providers provide highly scalable, on-demand infrastructure services. This allows flexibility and eliminates the costs and maintenance associated with setting up the infrastructure on-premises. However, a significant drawback is that you lose control over the infrastructure. If the vendor suffers a security breach, then you do, too.

Security Misconfigurations

IaaS vendors offer a cloud control plane to manage assets created in the cloud environment. Often, the more services, environments, assets, and interfaces you have, the more difficult it is to get everything properly configured. Once you initiate misconfiguration in the infrastructure, you expose it to malicious actors.

Escaping Virtual Machines (VMs), Containers, or Sandboxes

After gaining unescorted access to a VM, a serverless sandbox, or a container, a cloud user would gain unauthorized access to a hypervisor or an operating system running another user's workload in the cloud. A threat actor who reaches the hypervisor can indulge in various malicious activities, such as code modification, secret theft, and installing malware on instances of the same hardware.

Compromised Identities

Threat actors could obtain account credentials by installing a keylogger on an admin's machine. After unauthorized access to accounts that allow for the creation, termination, and use of VMs and other cloud resources, threat actors would be able to destroy services and allow access however they wanted through the cloud's API or UI.

Compliance and Regulation Requirements

Every business has specific compliance and regulation requirements that depend on the industry and the country. Compliance is incredibly complicated for companies working across borders or governments worldwide, and it requires adherence to standards that a cloud provider may need to have.