Cloud : Agility vs Security
Networking devices on the edges have become smarter over time. So have the firewalls and switches used internally within the networks. Whether we like it or not, web applications over time have grown to depend on them. Its impossible to build a flawless product because of which its standard practice to disable all unused services on a server. Most organizations today try to follow the n-tier approach to create different logical security zones with the core asset inside the most secure zone. The objective is to make it difficult for an attacker to get to the core asset without breaching multiple sets of firewalls. Doing frequent system patches, auditing file system permissions and setting up intrusion detection (host or network based) are some of the other mundane ways of keeping web applications safe from attacks. Though cloud has made deployment of on-demand infrastructure simpler, its hard to build a walled garden around customers cluster of servers on the cloud in an efficien