You're reading from Cloud Auditing Best Practices

Product typeBook

Published inJan 2023

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781803243771

Edition1st Edition

Concepts

Cybersecurity

Authors (2):

Shinesa Cambric

Michael Ratemo

View More author details

Tips and Techniques for Advanced Auditing

The cloud provides organizations with flexibility, scalability, increased collaboration, and speed. However, IT auditors need to be aware of the potential pitfalls that can increase the security risk for organizations. In this chapter, we want to equip IT auditors with a few tips and techniques they can leverage to make audits in the cloud more efficient. In addition, we will build awareness of considerations IT auditors need to know as they prepare for more advanced auditing requirements.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following main topics:

Common pitfalls
Tips, tricks, and techniques
Preparing for more advanced auditing
Other clouds – IBM, Oracle, Alibaba

By the end of this chapter, we will be able to identify the common pitfalls IT auditors need to be cognizant of as they approach their audits. We will also have knowledge of some tips and techniques that can be utilized for more effective audits...

Common pitfalls

With the scale, speed, and flexibility of the cloud comes complexity. This complexity leads to inherent pitfalls. We will review two broad areas that are common pitfalls for organizations that the IT auditor should be aware of. The first area involves administrative pitfalls that include not managing resource usage, an inability to control shadow IT, and a lack of automation. The second area concerns technical pitfalls that include misconfiguration, providing overly permissive access to users, and the inadvertent exposure of data, such as credentials.

Let’s look at the most common pitfalls IT auditors should focus on during an audit, and recommendations they may consider providing to a cloud customer.

Inability to forecast resource usage and costs

Cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and GCP have hundreds of services to choose from. Many cloud customers usually choose services not suited to their business needs due to poor...

Tips, tricks, and techniques

Cloud environments are complex and have low visibility. In a traditional data center, there was a finite number of assets that IT auditors could examine and report on. However, in a cloud environment, there can be exponential growth in the number of assets, which may include virtual machines (VMs), virtual networks, containers, serverless functions, and so on. It can be very challenging to inventory what is running in an organization’s cloud.

Asset inventory plays such a foundational role in a cyber security program, that CIS Critical Security Controls and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework list the need to inventory and control infrastructure assets as their first security controls.

The first thing the IT auditor needs to do is to understand the cloud asset inventory to be able to perform an effective audit. The IT auditor needs to understand what applications are running within the cloud and whether they are approved by the organization, or...

Preparing for more advanced auditing

So far we have been leveraging native graphical user interface (GUI) tools to perform audits. To prepare for more advanced auditing, the IT auditor should familiarize themselves with the command-line interface (CLI). A GUI permits users to interact with the cloud platform using graphical features such as icons, windows, and menus. In contrast, a CLI allows users to interact with the system via commands. A CLI gives the IT auditor more autonomy to write custom scripts that could be used to automate processes.

Let’s start by looking at the AWS CLI.

Note

Instructions on getting started and installing the AWS CLI can be found at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-started.html.

Once you have the AWS CLI installed, you will need to configure the basic settings that the AWS CLI uses to interact with AWS. These include security credentials, Default region name, and Default output format, as shown in Figure...

Other clouds

Although the book focuses on the “big three” cloud providers, we recognize that there are other cloud infrastructure solutions and want to briefly highlight these and options for learning more outside of this book.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or (OCI) has a unique attribute in the concept of compartments, which are used to segment and manage access as well as develop logical groupings of resources. OCI also offers features such as Security Zones, which are compartments where security can’t be disabled. Similar to other clouds, OCI has available features for finance and change management, tagging of resources for management, as well as options for logging and notification of log events through a feature known as Service Connector Hub.

Learn more at https://education.oracle.com/.

IBM Cloud

One of the more unique things about IBM Cloud is the amount of open source technology that is used throughout the platform...

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at tips, tricks, and techniques that you can utilize for the three major cloud providers AWS, Azure, and GCP. We covered how to identify the common pitfalls IT auditors need to be cognizant of as they approach their audits; tips and techniques to utilize for more effective audits, and considerations for more advanced audits, including other cloud environments.

In our next chapter, we’ll review tools for monitoring and assessing the cloud.

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Authors (2)

Shinesa Cambric

Shinesa Cambric (CCSP, CISSP, CISA, CISM, CDPSE) is a cloud security, compliance, and identity architect with expertise in the design and implementation of security architecture and controls. Her experience includes designing IAM and governance solutions, building insider threat programs, and providing subject matter expertise on the intersection of governance, risk, and compliance with IT and application security. She is a certification content advisor for CertNexus and CompTIA, her work has been included in global forums, such as RSAC and DevOps, and she is a contributing author to the books 97 Things Every Information Security Professional Should Know and Shifting Security Left. Shinesa volunteers, provides subject matter expertise, and mentors with several organizations, including Cloud Security Alliance, fwd:cloudsec, Women in Cyber Security (WiCys), Information Systems Security Association (ISSA), as a training lead with the Women's Society of Cyberjutsu, and as a board member with non-profit group Cloud Girls.
Read more about Shinesa Cambric

Michael Ratemo

Michael Ratemo (CISSP, CISA, CISM, GCSA, CCSK, CIA) is a cybersecurity leader and Principal Consultant at Cyber Security Simplified. He speaks security in a language businesses can understand and has built a career creating effective security strategies that are customized to protect organizations. He is skilled in elevating the effectiveness of an organization's security programs, to help drive business value and mitigate risks across large and complex environments. In addition, Michael is the author of the LinkedIn Learning Course, Building and Auditing a Cyber Security Program. Michael holds a BS in Computer Science and engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington, and an MBA from the University of North Texas.
Read more about Michael Ratemo

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