The current cloud security landscape

To understand your security architecture requirements, you must first ensure that you have a solid understanding of the IT environment that you are trying to protect. Before deploying any new security solution, there is a need to map out the solutions that are currently deployed and how they protect each area of the IT environment. The following list provides the major components of any modern IT environment:

• End user habits that are counter-productive to security endeavors
• Identity for the authentication and authorization of access to systems
• Networks to gain access to internal resources and the internet
• Storage and compute in the data center for internal applications and sensitive information
• End user devices and the applications they use to interact with data
• And in some environments, you can include Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and the Internet of Things (IoT)

When we start to look at the threats and vulnerabilities for these components, we quickly find ourselves deep in the alphabet soup of problems and solutions.

Figure 1.1 – The alphabet soup of cybersecurity

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the potential acronyms available. Understanding these acronyms is the first hurdle; matching them to the appropriate solutions and ensuring they are well deployed is another challenge altogether (a table of these acronyms can be found in the appendix of this book).