Cloud computing and security

With the increasing adoption of cloud based infrastructures, it has become more important than ever to make sure that the security architecture is well thought through. A thorough risk assessment is needs to be put in place to examine multiple technical, procedural, and organizational issues.

Gartner describes cloud computing as being "scalable" and "elastic", and provided as a service. Since its easier to scale nowadays, it is fairly important to analyse and take into consideration a number of risk assessment challenges that cannot be fully addressed with process oriented evaluations.

Complexity and Exposure complicate assessment

As shown in the figure above, the computing model is mapped into a two dimensional model. This complexity ranges from complexity running on 1 host to distributed across a large number of hosts.
Relatively less information is needed to assess the security posture of systems that are run by corporate staff, using familiar technology. The blue area in the middle refers to the risk compromise area. The services in the upper right yellow area are complex and highly exposed. Here the administrators are strangers and virtually everything happens in the public domain. Ref: https://www.gartner.com/doc/1324114/analyzing-risk-dimensions-cloud-saas