The critical elements you need to fully understand

before living in the cloud are the

physical attributes of

the cloud center: staffing, patrols, power, law

enforcement and fire or other disaster access, location and

method of secure backup, and recovery. This is all in addition to

the nature of the

hardware itself. You wouldn't live

in a house without understanding the physical security aspects,

and you certainly should not place your sensitive information and

processing somewhere with any less care.

At a

major communications hub in South Korea, we conducted a security

and resilience audit for critical secure voice systems. We tested

security and access controls, interviewed security forces on

response procedures, and exercised re-constitution plans. We

checked all supporting systems, microwave radios, and antenna

towers. We determined a simple loss of one tower would destroy

not just primary, but backup communications into and out of the

entire country. The moral of this story is that you cannot

overlook even the simplest physical security and continuity

element of your system.

There are a lot of physical challenges involved in

helping you to assess the trustworthiness of your

cloud provider and their datacenter(s). Is the

datacenter in an earthquake or flood zone? Where does the power

and backup power come from and how are they protected? I found a

commercial datacenter that was proud of their very expensive

turbine generators that could provide full replacement for

commercial sources for up to two weeks. It sounded good, until I

asked a simple question: If someone siphoned your fuel tanks,

would you know? The answer turned out to be, not until we tried

to run the generators. They now have sensors on their fuel tanks

and roaming patrols include a physical check of locks on them.

Expect your cloud partner to walk your security team through all

of them, and make certain you ask the question that is bugging

you. It could be critical.

Cautious circles of

the U.S. Federal Government used to send officers to the factory

of manufacturers of computer servers that would process sensitive

government information. They would travel with the computers

until they were turned over to government-controlled and

protected storage. Other trusted individuals would sign, deliver,

and install them under multi-person controls and

accountability.

If you build,

lease, or contract for one of these multi-tenant cloud centers,

with no assurance the hardware was not altered before or during

installation, modified chips could theoretically help foster the

exfiltration of sensitive information and help cover up the

attacks. Do you know where your servers have

been?

No related posts.