Cloud audit

The cloud offers many inherent advantages such as high scalability and flexibility, while keeping costs and maintenance low. This makes it an attractive alternative to rigid and cumbersome on-premise systems, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises.

What is a cloud audit?

Cloud audits are as diverse as the cloud itself. Our portfolio includes the following points, among others:

  • Advice on topics such as cloud architectures, setting up or evaluating DevSecOps processes or migrating legacy systems to the cloud
  • Config audits of (cloud-native) services such as Kubernetes, Docker, Openshift, Keycloak, CloudFoundry, Vault, Jenkins etc.
  • Control Plane Audits (analysis of the Cloud Control Plane, e.g. AWS, Azure and GCP)
  • Penetration tests or vulnerability assessments of systems in the cloud

If you have a problem in this subject area and do not yet know how to approach it optimally, an initial consultation is also a good idea. As part of this, we work with you to develop an individual solution in order to lead you optimally into the future.

What is a cloud audit?
Why is a cloud audit worthwhile?

The cloud represents the basis of your IT landscape in many ways. Therefore, it is imperative to implement appropriate security and hardening measures to protect them. Otherwise, the security level of the entire IT infrastructure can be impaired.

In addition, the cloud also brings a multitude of new technologies with it that are both a blessing and a curse. Although modern alternatives often make the development process easier, they often also bring new challenges and problems. A single misconfiguration can result in databases suddenly being freely accessible on the Internet.

With an audit of your cloud infrastructure and services, you can put your existing systems to the test. Does the authorization concept work? Are there design errors or misconfigurations? Are compliance requirements met?

If you are thinking about moving your on-premise systems to the cloud or setting up new infrastructure in the cloud, we would be happy to help you with the design and deployment. Furthermore, we can provide you with initial advice, talk about your project, potential problems and possible solutions.

Why is a cloud audit worthwhile?

Course of a config audit

  • Understand

    During an initial consultation, we jointly create an overview of your cloud infrastructure, the cloud services you use and the compliance requirements that apply to you.

  • Evaluate

    Based on the overview we have developed, we will present you with an audit strategy tailored to your needs in a second round.

  • Analysis

    Based on the selected strategy, an automated and manual evaluation of all relevant configuration files or settings is carried out using recognized best practices and selected compliance requirements.

  • Reporting

    The vulnerabilities and misconfigurations found are analyzed and documented, and appropriate recommendations for action are created.

  • (OPTIONAL) Automation

    If you wish, following the audit, we will help you as part of a consulting service to integrate the (tool-supported) checks we have carried out into your development process.

Follow-up and closure

At the end of the audit, you will receive a report with compliance requirements, hardening measures and specific weaknesses from misconfigurations. With this report, you can now further harden your cloud. If you have any questions, we are still available for you.

A subsequent check can document your progress. By automating the checks carried out, you can continuously and independently monitor your security level using defined KPIs.

Config audits are a good and cost-effective choice when your IT systems are managed using a central configuration. This is particularly the case when using concepts such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) or Configuration as Code (CaC). Otherwise, a penetration test or vulnerability assessment could often be the better choice, since the current state of the systems is checked.

It’s difficult to give a general answer without a conversation. In principle, we can accompany you the entire way from planning to the finished application.

The depth to which you need our help depends on several factors. So feel free to contact us for an initial consultation: [email protected].

When moving your on-premise systems to the cloud, you should make sure that you don’t just use a pure “lift-and-shift” approach in which existing structures are replicated in the cloud.

Although this seems very tempting in view of the initial effort, it often leads to problems and the advantages of the cloud cannot be fully leveraged.

While this question keeps coming up, there is no easy answer here. The security of your cloud infrastructure depends on many factors that are often independent of the provider. Rather, it is important to adapt your configuration to the cloud provider and to use the security functions provided in order to achieve a high level of security.

Get in touch

Curious? Any more questions? Call us, write a mail or book a meeting with one of our consultants right away!

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