What is Cloud Security Architecture?

Key Principles of Cloud Security Architecture

The following principles form the foundation of cloud security architecture:

• Security Controls: These consist of protective rules, procedures or tangible assets and measures that enforce control over data, users, and infrastructure to regulate the organization’s cybersecurity stance.
• Logging and Monitoring: Automated systems that continuously observe and track behaviors of connected systems and cloud services to ensure compliance and threat awareness. A common example is use of Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) systems as part of a broader monitoring initiative.
• Secure Development Methodology: These are standardized, repeatable practices to ensure the security of code, configurations, and baseline automation. Secure DevOps practices allow for consistent deployment across environments and adherence to relevant audit requirements and security standards.
• Identity & Access Governance: Control over user access, including individuals, devices, and services that access organizational cloud assets. Identity access management (IAM), which enforces user access rights and protocols, is a concrete implementation of this principle.
• Regulatory Compliance: Ensures the adherence to industry standards and regulatory demands by integrating those components into the architecture.
• Perimeter Security: Safeguards traffic flowing inbound and outbound from an organization’s cloud resources along with the entry/exit points at network edges.
• Cloud Asset Identification: An inventory of users, accounts or services, environments, policies, vulnerabilities, threats or risks, and other assets within the organization’s cloud presence.
• Segmentation and Microsegmentation: This is the division of architecture into smaller, isolated, easily managed partitions. This approach, one of the tenets of zero trust architecture, increases security at boundaries and reduces the likelihood of lateral movement by intruders and blast radius from any threats.
• Data Protection: Both data at rest and in transit are protected through encryption mechanisms to reduce the risk of sensitive data compromise and minimize the potential impacts of a data breach.
• Multi-cloud Visibility: Visibility across mutli-cloud environments, an increasingly popular approach to cloud architecture. Commonly relies on cloud security solutions and processes to adequately handle complex multiple cloud deployment strategies.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): DevSecOps and related secure SDLC practices rely on IaC practices and tooling to automate activities like configuration setup and updates, allowing for repeatable, secure infrastructure deployments.
• Agile Architecture: Ensures that architecture is designed with adaptability and flexibility in mind, without negatively impacting existing security measures.

At its core, the purpose of these principles is to uphold the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (the CIA Triad) of cloud-based systems.

Service Models and Their Impact on Security

The various service models used by organizations drastically affect an organization’s approach to security. Those service models are infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS).

The shared responsibility model affects all three of these service models. Shared responsibility dictates that the cloud service provider (CSP) is responsible for the security of the underlying components and infrastructure that comprise the cloud service: software, computing, storage, databases, networking, and other hardware. The CSP’s customers are responsible for protecting the data and information stored and accessed in the cloud.

IaaS Security Considerations

IaaS providers enable organizations to build on top of core infrastructure building blocks, creating virtual networks, virtual machines (VMs), and storage. Securing IaaS requires a focus on strong data encryption procedures, container security, and protection of serverless assets. It further involves implementing network segmentation and micro-segmentation, configuring firewalls and virtual private networks (VPNs), and deploying intrusion detection systems (IDS) or intrusion prevention systems (IPS).

PaaS security considerations

PaaS provides the platforms, middleware, databases and other services organizations use for application development. To address PaaS security concerns, the focus moves to development processes and the application layer. Customers are responsible for securing applications, middleware, databases, configurations, and permissions. Here, strong access controls to code repositories, monitoring development pipelines, and validating user inputs are all necessary. Implementation of “shift left” or DevSecOps practices is vital to detecting and mitigating risks early in the development lifecycle.

SaaS security considerations

SaaS providers handle the bulk of the security requirements, as they deliver a complete, fully-managed application. Customers are responsible for implementing access controls, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and single sign-on (SSO) to protect accounts. The security concerns in SaaS shift towards regular audits of user roles and permissions, encryption of sensitive data, monitoring user behavior, ensuring data access and handling procedures maintain privacy and integrity, and securing third-party integrations.