Witnessing the frequent news about security breaches, securing cloud resources has become a major priority for many organizations. Most enterprises are switching to cloud and multi-cloud environments to take advantage of cloud computing benefits, including reduced capital expenditures, lower infrastructure maintenance costs, and the ability to create highly available, scalable, and secure IT environments.

In this post, we will examine the security features provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

What is cloud security?

Cloud security includes a range of security controls and configurations, rather than a single setting or checkbox. It is a crucial topic for discussion, no matter the size of your enterprise. Cloud infrastructure underpins nearly every aspect of modern computing across various industries and sectors.

The reason for still confusion is cloud security, it is because organizations may not understand completely their obligations. Some imagine that the cloud is the only one that is concerned about security, and this is a very big problem because it is not always the case.

So, let’s start our exploration of cloud security by examining the shared responsibility model.

Cloud Security: Understanding Your versus Your Cloud Provider’s Responsibilities

Cloud security is outsourcing to a cloud service provider. However, you are not free to shift the entire security responsibility to them. Cloud providers do play a part in security issues, but you also have your own duties.

This idea is the so-called ‘shared responsibility model’ also known as SRM. The cloud providers’ responsibility is to protect their physical infrastructure and the cloud service. You, on the other hand, are responsible for ensuring that your use of the cloud complies with the key security, governance, and compliance standards.

Here’s a high-level overview of how this operates:

The cloud providers are in charge of the security of cloud infrastructure, while the users are responsible for the protection of their data and applications.

In particular, your provider must take measures to block brute-force login attempts, but you have to deal with risks arising from user mistakes or malicious behavior. 

How distinct are Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services from one another, really? 

Even if each provider has its strengths, all three offer a comprehensive set of security features for your organization and its valuable data to stay safe. No matter which provider you decide to go with, expect high performance in the following areas:    

• Firewall: A virtual block that controls which traffic enters and which traffic exits your network, blocking malware and hacking attempts
• Encryption in transit: Encryption is used to protect your data during its transportation from your site to the cloud provider or between services
• Compliance management: The certification for the main compliance standards and the compliance tools that help users stay compliant with data regulations such as the GDPR
• IaaS DDoS protection: Features to avoid DDoS attacks, for instance, having detector software and buying more bandwidth to cope with traffic spikes. AWS names their service ‘DDOS Protection’, Azure’s one is ‘Shield’, and GCP’s one is ‘Google Cloud Armor’
• Physical security: The actions taken to protect the physical servers of the cloud provider such as security guards and alarm systems are measured

Amazon Web Services

The most liked option for a cloud service provider is Amazon Web Services, the most established and oldest of the three market leaders. It’s understandable why, given the copious documentation and default security configurations.

AWS shared responsibility model

AWS works in a very straightforward manner, with its ‘security in the cloud’ concept taking on a very clear yet effective approach. They handle the hardware, storage, networking, and databases, while the customers are in charge of practices for data security, user access, and third-party applications.

Features of AWS:

Being the oldest cloud provider, AWS has a few key benefits over the others like Documentation which is is both transparent and well-organised. Providing search tool; Tooling is more mature, with the largest marketplace for third-party add-ons. More IT security professionals have AWS experience than either Azure or GCP.  AWS’ partner network is the largest and most mature.

In some key security-related areas, AWS configures itself in ways that improve your security out of the gate. For example, if you deploy an instance into a VPC, its default configuration restricts access. AWS’ cloud-native auditing tool CloudTrail can be used to help manage compliance across your environments, enhance your own security posture, and consolidate activity records across regions and accounts. It’s a larger surface area to manage, but the power of AWS’ fine-grained identity access management works by giving you more granular controls for configuring federation, users and access for each account. The inherent siloing of environments means they are more protected from breaches elsewhere in the organization.

Noticeable Points:

AWS’ model of user access control (along with reliance on isolation for any form of security) leads to more enterprise-style management overhead.

Microsoft Azure offers a somewhat stronger VPN. Whereas both have point-to-site and sit

Microsoft Azure

After AWS, Microsoft Azure is the second-oldest provider of cloud services. Some firms may find its centralized approach ideal, but others may find it frustrating due to its vague shared responsibility concept and inconsistent practices.

Microsoft Azure shared responsibility model

Azure’s shared responsibility model is divided into three modules;

The first, the ‘‘customer’’ is almost always the one who is going to have to cough up the cash. It contains information, data, and devices like Mobile PCs, and user accounts, that are alternatively known as identities.

The second category is another gray area because sharp discrimination based on this depends on the model adopted which is the Saas or SaaS, PaaS or Platform as a Service, and IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service.

The last one is another category that is completely under the cloud provider’s agreement and this is when the cloud provider is fully responsible for the safety of the system whether it is SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS. One of these could be the infrastructure in the data centers which are hosting these services Those could include An inquiry could be directed to the infrastructure in the data centers that are running these services.

Features of Microsoft Azure:

Using centralized identity and access management (IAM) strategy, your working procedures will be run by Azure’s Active Directory. This means managing becomes easier and less sensitive to human influence because you can manage authorization and permissions from one place.

Although the specific alert at the local level can be set by the team or any other user via Azure Security Center, the activity log of Azure contains console and API activity by default on the enterprise level (regardless of the regions).

Privilege access management is continuously integrated into Azure to offer JIT access that is, Just-In-Time access to Azure AD and Azure resources. To do this, AWS relies on the third-party add-ons while GCP also relies the third-party add-ons.

Azure offers the strongest VPN functionality here with the site-to-site connection provisioned at 30 while supporting both the point-to-site as well as site-to-site configurations.

Noticeable Points:

 Due to the fact that Azure in the past has been weak on documentation and it has been rather patchy and incomplete now is probably the time to take things slowly and do a lot of testing.

This is to mean that it might be a while before changes made with the console affect the greater area.

Conflicts of identification may occur with the shared responsibility model because this concept is smaller than its direct counterparts and has far less black-and-white aspects.

Some weaknesses can be identified because of the imbalanced coverage of certain security processes. For example, in the case of a new virtual machine connected to a virtual network, all ports and protocols are allowed by default (although AWS and GCP use default deny).

While, compared to distributed IAM, it is easier to manage in Azure, the environments are not as isolated from each other.          

Features of Google Cloud SRM:

Despite being relatively young, GCP has a lot of intriguing features based on extensive technical and worldwide operations knowledge from other sources. AI features and container management in particular stand out as being industry leaders.

GCP provides a scalable and easily manageable centralized security management solution. Although projects are separated from one another by default, you are free to connect them if that is how you would prefer.

Similar to AWS, Google consistently applies secure setups by default and keeps its approach uniform across all of its cloud offerings.

 Noticeable Points:

 With less documentation than the other two big cloud providers, this one is the newest. It could also be difficult to locate IT security experts with GCP knowledge. Google’s VPN capabilities are the least robust of the three; at the moment, point-to-site VPN connections are not supported; only site-to-site VPN connections are. Because the GCP marketplace isn’t as developed, there are fewer third-party add-ons and fewer built-in security features overall.   

Which One Should you choose?

 All three of the major cloud providers offer a wide range of security measures and services. The best one for your organization will be determined by your specific needs and requirements.

Here’s a table briefing about cloud provider security:                                 

In the great majority, the end choice of cloud service vendor is strongly influenced by the individual customer needs.  For example, If the cloud provider comes with advanced AI tools then it should be Google Cloud Platform.

Azure is an option for those customers who prioritize centralized IAM features and AWS has the most stable sophisticated product among all providers, chosen by those who want maximum reliability.