Cloud Security Assessment

A cloud audit focusing on various critical aspects such as security, cost optimization, cloud-native services, resilience, backups, IAM (Identity and Access Management), segmentation, and architecture involves a comprehensive evaluation of a cloud environment to ensure its efficiency, security, and compliance with best practices.

The audit typically includes:

Security Assessment:

• Evaluating security configurations and policies to protect against threats.
• Assessing encryption of data in transit and at rest.
• Reviewing network security settings, including firewalls and intrusion detection systems.
• Assess the use of cloud-native security services and alerting.
• Inspect the running environment to identify patching status of servers and applications.

Cost Optimization Analysis:

• Analysing resource utilization and costs to identify inefficiencies.
• Reviewing pricing models and reserved instance usage for cost savings.
• Evaluating auto-scaling settings and resource allocation for optimal usage.

Use of Cloud-Native Services:

• Assessing the adoption and implementation of cloud-native services for scalability and efficiency.
• Reviewing the integration of services like serverless computing, container orchestration, and managed databases.

Resilience and Disaster Recovery:

• Examining the strategies for high availability and disaster recovery.
• Assessing the effectiveness of redundancy and failover mechanisms.
• Reviewing geographic distribution of resources for business continuity.

Backups and Data Retention:

• Evaluating backup policies, schedules, and data retention practices.
• Reviewing the security and integrity of backup data.
• Review backup data immutability.
• Review backup restore plan and recent tests.

Identity and Access Management (IAM):

• Reviewing policies and controls for user authentication and authorization.
• Assessing the implementation of least privilege access and role-based access control (RBAC).
• Evaluating IAM policies for both internal users and external collaborators.

Management of secrets:

• Assess the storage of secrets to ensure they are effectively audited when accessed and changed.
• Assess the granularity of secrets to ensure that credentials are consumed in tightly scoped manner.

Network Segmentation and Micro-segmentation:

• Analysing network segmentation practices for security and efficiency.
• Reviewing the implementation of micro-segmentation for enhanced security within the cloud environment.
• Assessing virtual network configurations, including subnets, gateways, and peering.

Cloud Architecture Review:

• Evaluating the overall cloud architecture for best practices and performance.
• Reviewing the deployment of services and resources for optimal configuration.
• Assessing the scalability and maintainability of the cloud infrastructure.
• Ensure adequate protection from DDoS and web attacks.
• Identify Single Points of Failure (SPF).

Compliance with Standards and Best Practices (Typically CIS, PCI-DSS Optional):

• Checking adherence to relevant industry standards and compliance requirements.
• Reviewing documentation and policies for compliance verification.

Logging and Monitoring:

• Evaluate existing logging configuration to identify coverage of critical systems and services.
• Evaluate existing monitoring coverage.
• Review existing security and performance alerting.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Review:

• Assessing the use of IaC for provisioning and managing infrastructure.
• Reviewing the security and compliance of IaC scripts and templates.
• Evaluating version control, change management, and audit trails for IaC.