Modern-day businesses are complex & perpetual both in terms of technology and customer deliverables; to keep agile, enterprises are transforming traditional IT assets with virtual assets and migrating their workloads to cloud infrastructures (private cloud, public cloud, hybrid & multicloud) for the same. Businesses require extremely secured infrastructure to manage data and its privacy. With limitations of vendor lock-ins by public cloud service providers, major enterprises are moving their cloud choices from public to private cloud. Since private cloud being an integral part of enterprises gives users the flexibility to manage, monitor & secure according to their own business needs. Gartner predicts that ‘By 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault’, and from a customer point of view it shows the need for private cloud enabled organizations like you to understand the key strategies and best practices to follow to safeguard a private cloud.
Through this blog we explain everything you need to know about private cloud security and its architecture in detail. Read further to know it.
Need Of Private Cloud Security Architecture
The CIO’s & CSO’s believe cloud security is one major layer of private cloud management that organizations need to look out and understand to safeguard the data and applications. It needs to be addressed right from the stage of building a private cloud architecture for a business ecosystem. In private cloud architecture, security management is a shared responsibility between the private cloud services provider or a private cloud hosting provider and the user. Both the parties need to understand their security management roles and should play an integral part of designing a private cloud architecture as a whole.
Vision to build a security based private cloud architecture eliminates the security holes or leakages which may act as a gate point of vulnerabilities providing easy access for attackers. Planning this phase in the early days of architecting a solution gives the users fruitful results compared to building a security solution to mitigate after threats.
This practice of strategizing a future-proof private cloud architecture for security is the need of the hour as more organizations are shifting their data to clouds specifically to multicloud or hybrid cloud models.
Elements of a private cloud security architecture
The best practice to build a secured private cloud architecture is to start with a statement of goals. The private cloud security architecture starts at the attack points ( ingress or egress ) for private cloud hosting or edge computing. In either case, the private cloud service provider will install intelligent security devices or intrusion prevention systems (ISP)- enabled firewalls as a primary point of threat detector that allows users to monitor the flow of in & out traffic. It follows the implementation of SSL, TSL, VPN, and other advanced security frameworks in the form of security-as-a-service.
The cloud security patterns follow a series of independent yet collaborative functions for private cloud management in the whole architectural design. These include the following layers: network security, data security, application security, and service security. The responsibilities are shared among organizations & private cloud service providers according to their SLAs.
Private cloud security architecture should include the following elements :
- Security Control endpoints – Includes technologies & steps to secure API endpoints and mechanisms to control the boundaries of network connectivity linkage of applications and services of private cloud.
- Security protocols – Implementation of security frameworks for private cloud architecture with Integrations such as SSL, IPSEC, SFTP, LDAPS, SSH, SCP, SAML, etc.
- Security token – Token management approaches such as OTP, secret keys, private keys, etc., for authentication, authorization, & administration of private cloud to safeguard access of applications & its data.
- Encryption methods – Includes techniques like masking, duplicating, hashing, triple DES, AES, blowfish, RSA to encrypt data to avoid vulnerabilities of a private cloud.
- Security event logging & auditing – Designing flow of event logging ingestion with the help of tools or discrete approaches to capture, monitor & audit the activities within the private cloud.
Three prominent private cloud architectural patterns to meet safety
- Federated identity pattern: It is a system where multiple organizations enable its users to use shared credentials in digital identity to access all their networks.
- Firewall pattern: It is a system where managed firewalls are installed between users and application resources to validate rights and access.
- User token pattern: It is a mechanism that allows users to access the resources for a limited period of time
Private cloud management via shared security responsibilities
Cloud services are deployed via various models across private cloud: IaaS where a virtual host is provided, PaaS supports platform-specific tools and acts as middleware, SaaS offers entire cloud application service is deployed and in each model, the security architecture varies as per the roles and responsibilities shared between private cloud hosting providers & organizations.
IaaS deployment gives users a highly flexible network security environment to manage & monitor the status & health of both physical & virtual assets. With IaaS deliverables, private cloud service providers act as pillars of reliable hosting resources. The majority of the application-related security handlings are under the managed schema of the customer.
Key security inclusions of IaaS cloud deployments
- Network fragmentation and flow analysis
- Intrusion detection systems (IDS) and Intrusion prevention systems (IPS)
- Virtual firewalls, VPN, SSL, SD-WAN connectors for edge compute, SSL/TLS layers to secure web applications.
PaaS acts as middleware and delivers to customers as platform-based services to support enterprise applications without the overhead of managing complex hardware & back-end services. In this private cloud security model, more focus is aligned towards the creation of trust zones & centralized security fronts. Here most of the private cloud security management is carried out by CSP while compared to IaaS, but still, organizations have their role in securing the infrastructure.
Key security inclusions of PaaS cloud deployments
- Secured API gateways (throttling targets, access to VPC, firewalls, SSL certificates)
- IP restrictions and geo whitelisting
- User restrictions and audit reports
SaaS providers offer security through a software-defined application that establishes a relation between the internal workflow components and the organization’s network components via restful APIs. Compared to other security deliverable models in SaaS, CSP maintains the responsibility of most of the security stacks while organizations only need to look after a few modules of security layers.
Key security inclusions of SaaS cloud deployments
- Logging, alerting, scheduling
- User access controls, IAM roles
- Support of security frameworks (DISA, NIST, etc.) and compliance to guidelines (GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, SOX, ISO,)
Over the years, the chief security officers of several cloud-enabled organizations realized that the best practice to design a private cloud architecture with the highest levels of security is through the synchronization of the private cloud service provider and the user. So while framing the security frameworks, organizations need to be handheld by security experts, and only the inclusion of best-fit security elements & practices give highly secured private cloud-hosted infrastructure.
Also you can check our blog on ‘How to improve your private cloud security postures’ from here.
Security at its best with United private cloud
Cloud security is no longer a choice; it’s the need of the hour and our G3 private cloud is the epitome of a secure cloud, where users get a fully managed security-as-a-service. With us, you can proactively identify, respond and mitigate any security threats against your IT infrastructure through our industry-leading security solutions. We protect your infrastructure and data through advanced Firewalls, DDoS, VPN, SSL/TLS, VLAN segmentation, restricted IP, and ports.
G3 cloud is solemnly designed with a motto to ensure our private cloud users with the highest level of security compared to all other major private cloud providers by providing industry leading solutions for ransomware protection, infrastructure protection, hybridcloud acceleration, public cloud data protection and complies with all major data security compliance standards(CIS, NIST, DISA, GDPR, SOX, SSAE, PCI, HIPAA, FEDRAMP) globally with our compliance ready private cloud.
Talk to our security experts today and get your private cloud security architecture framed.
