The Importance of Investing in laas Security and Monitoring

Infrastructure as a Service or laas is a popular cloud service today. With cyber threats on the rise, it's important to use tools that ensure the security of these services as well as monitor them.

- Phani Kiran

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a service model that enables on-demand resource provisioning for compute, storage and network with a pay-as-you-go model. Users are not required to bear upfront capital costs. They can specify the resources they need as IaaS consumers, and can provision the virtual resources. It is the IaaS producer’s responsibility to maintain the actual physical resources.

Security is one of the key pillars of a cloud infrastructure. The primary focus of security is on:

• Security information and event management systems
• Host intrusion detection systems 
• Extended detection and response systems
• Anomalous behaviour prediction systems

How is IaaS made secure?

A number of key activities help make IaaS secure. Most cloud providers carry out these activities, which include:

• Periodic database scans 
• Threat protection

• SQL injection
• Brute force
• Suspicious login
• Data exfiltration

• Send alerts 
• Vulnerability assessment 
• Audits ƒ Follow remediation steps 
• Respond to hardware events 
• Allow queries on running processes 
• Network connection status (open/closed) 
• Monitor system calls 
• Firewall analysis 
• Log analysis 
• Network traffic monitoring 
• Check on suspicious and anomalous behaviour

Emerging standards: The Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework