Cloud Shared Responsibility: A SANS Whitepaper

As the use of cloud computing has grown, so has the concept of the shared responsibility model for data protection and cybersecurity in general. While not a new concept, the nature of shared security responsibilities has changed with the advent of the cloud. While all cloud providers are wholly responsible for physical security of their data center environments, data center disaster recovery planning, business continuity, and legal and personnel requirements that pertain to security of their operating environments, cloud customers still need to plan for their own disaster recovery and continuity processes, particularly in IaaS clouds where theyre building infrastructure. If any of this sounds confusing, thats because it is! There are many challenges facing us as the pace of cloud implementation accelerates. Theres an enormous amount of complexity with new services and software-defined infrastructure. Today, theres no doubt at all that the attackers have discovered new attack paths and techniques that target cloud environments. The nature of todays security operations has to change as we move to the cloud. With this webcast, we will discuss the definitive lack of skills in cloud technologies (and security specifically, leading to deficiencies in cloud detection and response workflows), the much faster deployments and changes to keep pace with, and a need for new and better controls to help combat these systemic challenges. To begin figuring out what to do about them, we need a better grounding in exactly who is responsible for what in the cloud, and what kinds of security controls and services are best suited to helping cloud security operations mature and grow.