These past few weeks have really been my first 'real' work done in public cloud, i've played around as I'm sure many other people have but now we're really using it.
The thing that surprised me most is that within minutes of me spinning up a VM which had a public facing IP there were hacking attempts going on. You hear a lot in the news about this kind of activity going on and to a large degree we are generally quite protected from this - hidden behind corporate firewalls or behind whatever our internet providers set up for home use.
A simple execute of the 'lastb' command on the linux vm reported hundreds of attempts to access the system using accounts such as:
root
oracle
nagios
ADMIN
support
.... (the list goes on)
This really highlights the need for whoever is working in these cloud environments understands all the various aspects of security protecting their systems - everything from firewalls to pki to strong password policies - the list of course goes on and on
If the system ever gets connected back to the corporate lan then of course there is even more need to be vigilant and security design is perhaps the most important part of what is built in the cloud.
Everyone working in --insert cloud name here-- really needs to think before they act and i would not feel at all comfortable with a free for all approach for the entire IT team (or even the business users...)
Be careful out there.......
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