| By Jonathan Gershater |
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| November 29, 2012 07:00 AM EST |
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2,957 |
When you host applications in the public cloud, you assume partial responsibility for securing the application. The cloud provider, for example Amazon Web Services (AWS), secures the physical data center (with locked badge entry doors, fences, guards etc) in addition to securing the physical network with perimeter firewalls. This is no significant change from how you secure your corporate datacenter.
Just like you enhance the security of physical and virtual servers in your datacenter with host-based firewalls (ip tables, Windows firewall), anti-virus and intrusion detection, so you must protect your public cloud servers (in AWS parlance - "instances") with similar security measures. This is the joint or shared security responsibility - AWS secures the physical datacenter and firewalls the network; you the AWS customer secures each instance and its application with host-based firewalls , anti-virus and intrusion detection. In addition if your public cloud applications must be compliant, perhaps with PCI regulations, then you can add file integrity monitoring and log file monitoring to each AWS instance.
Security is shared, no blame goes around....Watch a quick demo how to enhance the security of your AWS instances and applications.
Click here to watch
Jonathan Gershater has lived and worked in Silicon Valley since 1996, primarily doing system and sales engineering specializing in: Web Applications, Identity and Security. At Trend Micro he works with customers to secure their virtual and cloud environments. Prior to joining Trend Micro, Jonathan worked at 3Com, Entrust (by acquisition) two startups and Sun Microsystems.
(The views expressed in this blog are entirely mine and do not represent my employer - Jonathan).
