Syllabus in PDF.

Class Objectives:

Cloud computing infrastructure have become a mainstay of the IT industry, opening the possibility for on-demand, highly elastic and infinite compute power with scalability and supporting the delivery of mission-critical secure enterprise applications and services. This course provides the ground-up coverage on the high-level concepts of cloud landscape, architectural principles, techniques, design patterns and real-world best practices applied to Cloud service providers and consumers and delivering secure Cloud based services. The course will describe the Cloud security architecture and explore the guiding security design principles, design patterns, industry standards, applied technologies and addressing regulatory compliance requirements critical to design, implement, deliver and manage secure cloud based services. The course delves deep into the secure cloud architectural aspects with regards to identifying and mitigating risks, protection and isolation of physical & logical infrastructures including compute, network and storage, comprehensive data protection at all OSI layers, end-to-end identity management & access control, monitoring and auditing processes and meeting compliance with industry and regulatory mandates. The course will leverage cloud computing security guidelines set forth by ISO, NIST, ENISA and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). Students will learn and develop understanding of the following:

• Fundamentals of cloud computing architectures based on current standards, protocols, and best practices intended for delivering Cloud based enterprise IT services and business applications.
• Identify the known threats, risks, vulnerabilities and privacy issues associated with Cloud based IT services.
• Understand the concepts and guiding principles for designing and implementing appropriate safeguards and countermeasures for Cloud based IT services
• Approaches to designing cloud services that meets essential Cloud infrastructure characteristics – on-demand computing, shared resources, elasticity and measuring usage.
• Design security architectures that assures secure isolation of physical and logical infrastructures including compute, network and storage, comprehensive data protection at all layers, end-to-end identity and access management, monitoring and auditing processes and compliance with industry and regulatory mandates.
• Understand the industry security standards, regulatory mandates, audit policies and compliance requirements for Cloud based infrastructures.

Class Notes

• This class covers a great deal of information about Cloud security technologies, so no single textbook can cover it all. Class notes will be provided for all topics covered.
• The course material will follow the Cloud security guidelines prescribed by NIST, Cloud Security Alliance and ENISA.
• To begin participating in the course, review the Weekly Checklist found in the course web site.

Recommended Texts

• Securing The Cloud: Cloud Computing Security Techniques and Tactics by Vic (J.R.) Winkler (Syngress/Elsevier) - 978-1-59749-592-9
• Cloud Computing Design Patterns by Thomas Erl (Prentice Hall) - 978-0133858563