Enterprise cloud security has come a long way in recent years. With the advent of virtualization, enterprises have been able to run multiple workloads on a single physical server or cluster of servers without compromising security.
While this has been a boon for businesses that need to scale quickly, it has also opened up new challenges for IT professionals tasked with securing their data center infrastructure.
Most organizations face pressure to improve the efficiency of their technologies while reducing costs. Cloud computing is being adopted as a means of doing so, but concerns over security present a barrier. Making the transition to cloud computing essentially means moving IT infrastructure and services to a hosted, outside provider.
The same can be said regarding security in a cloud. Companies of all sizes are using OpenStack to build clouds to run their critical infrastructure and applications.
In this blog, we’ll examine the current state of enterprise cloud security and explore how OpenStack can help improve it.
Enterprises Go Full Steam Ahead with OpenStack
Security is a top priority across all components; with freedom at its core and the growing transitions to public clouds, the challenges of security and compliance are ever-present. As enterprises move to the cloud, they are concerned about the safety and security of their data, just as they would be for data on-premises.
OpenStack allows enterprises to avoid vendor lock-in, which creates a higher level of flexibility, freedom, and control by allowing them to build (and rebuild) their infrastructure with minimum costs. It can easily run different operating systems and applications on the same infrastructure, which improves fault tolerance and increases the availability of services while utilizing fewer resources.
OpenStack also provides network isolation and segmentation, where it uses software-defined networking (SDN) to isolate network traffic so that it cannot interact with other networks on the same physical infrastructure. This allows enterprises to deploy services like VPNs and firewalls into their clouds without worrying about compromising security.
The thing is that OpenStack isn’t just a security solution for enterprises but is also utilized by smaller businesses and startups that don’t have the budget for traditional IT solutions. Read here to learn more about how OpenStack has been creating a buzz in the market.
How OpenStack Helps Users Secure their Clouds
The OpenStack community is a large and active group of developers, users, and contributors. As such, they have created tools that can help you secure your cloud environment.
OpenStack has been designed to be an open-source software (OSS) so that anyone can use it without having to pay for commercial licenses or support from vendors.
Here’s how OpenStack assists its users in operating a safer cloud environment:
- Comprehensive Services: It allows individuals and businesses alike access to its powerful toolset and components, including Keystone, Horizon, Nova, etc., without having to sign any contracts or pay fees upfront.
- Management Proficiency: It gives users the ability to manage their cloud infrastructure in a way that’s similar to how they manage their own data center.
- Full Access or Control: It allows users to configure their own security policies and control access to their cloud resources. The result is a highly adaptable solution that can be customized based on an organization’s specific needs while also providing robust protection against threats through integrated firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), malware analysis tools, and more.
- Ease of Monitoring: It gives users the ability to monitor and audit activity across all of their servers, from individual operating system packages down to virtual machine instances. This all takes place from one centralized location without having to rely on third-party vendors.
Also Read: Block Storage vs Object Storage
Mainframe Security Architect: Security is built into the fabric of the OpenStack platform
OpenStack is a collection of services that work together to provide enterprise cloud computing. The platform is open source, with a security team dedicated to tracking and addressing vulnerabilities in the system.
OpenStack provides greater visibility into the cloud environment and provides an easy way for end users to manage it themselves. This means you can leverage OpenStack and its components to monitor your clouds for potential threats in real-time and take action if necessary.
The main components of OpenStack are:
Keystone
It is the OpenStack identity service that offers API-based authentication and authorization services. It’s responsible for storing and providing credentials to users, which are then used by other services in the cloud.
The information stored includes an authentication token, user information, and other attributes such as role assignments or group membership. It also provides authentication services for all OpenStack clouds and has a REST API that can be accessed by other services.
Horizon
It is the dashboard that offers a graphical web interface and allows administrators and tenants of OpenStack clouds to manage their own instances, volumes, networks, and services.
Users can also create custom scripts that automate the management of most tasks in Horizon, such as deploying new instances or updating them with software updates through its API.
In addition to managing personal resources through Horizon, users can also manage other public clouds using its integration with OpenStack APIs.
Heat
It is an Orchestration service that provides a templating engine for deploying cloud applications. It is a flexible and extensible tool that allows you to define your application’s deployment strategy, including how it will be deployed, what resources it should use, and where its files are stored on disk.
It can also provide tools for monitoring and managing applications’ performance, as well as assist with debugging and troubleshooting problems with your cloud deployments. It allows users to create, manage, and deploy multiple composite cloud applications based on simple text files.
Ceilometer
It is the logging service that allows users to collect network performance metrics from nodes and storage devices, as well as monitor them for abnormal behavior or failure events.
This information can be used by other services within OpenStack, such as Heat, to intelligently manage resource utilization automatically over time. This service can also be used to generate alarms based on collected data and notify other parts of the system when certain conditions occur.
Moreover, OpenStack gives its users ownership over their own cloud infrastructure. The community-based nature of OpenStack means that no one vendor controls it.
In addition to its community-based approach toward software development itself, it is not just about building features; it’s also about making sure they work well together.
OpenStack has also been very successful at getting vendors involved early on in its life cycle so they can contribute patches back into upstream projects like neutron (the core networking component) or cinder (the storage component).
Why should you trust the OpenStack-based Ace Public Cloud for your data?
Ace Public Cloud is built on the OpenStack platform and secured using firewalls that prevent cyber-attacks and continuously monitor network traffic. It is also an endlessly scalable platform that makes use of cutting-edge technologies and provides users with long-lasting, scalable, and useful answers to your cloud challenges.
We are proud to offer a worldwide network of tier IV and V data centers featuring state-of-the-art infrastructure and monitoring services to ensure your business runs smoothly.
Ace public cloud’s OpenStack dashboard UI is built to be customer friendly and easy to understand. It enables users to manage and maintain resources like virtual processors (CPU), configure servers, storage disks (SSDs and HDDs), and RAM.
Users can also easily assess resource usage, view active virtual machines, and gain visibility, control, and easy access to power management tools. They can use resources such as compute and storage on a pay-as-you-go basis to deploy servers, networks, VMs, OS, and other on-demand IT resources.
Contact our experts to help you get started with Ace. Call us at +1-855-910-6927 or visit us.
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