CCSP Domain 5: Operations

Introduction

The Certified Cloud Security Professional certification, or CCSP, is a certification hosted by the joint effort of (ISC)2 and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). This exciting credential is designed for cloud-based information security professionals and ensures that the certification holder has acquired the requisite skills, knowledge and abilities in cloud implementation, security design, controls, operations and compliance with applicable regulations.

The CCSP certification exam comprises six domains: Architectural Concepts and Design Requirements, Cloud Data Security, Cloud Platform and Infrastructure Security, Operations, Cloud Application Security and Legal and Compliance. This article will detail the Operations domain of the CCSP exam and what candidates preparing for the CCSP certification can expect on the exam.

The Operations domain of CCSP currently accounts for 15% of the material covered by the CCSP certification exam.

5.1 Support the Planning Process for the Data Center Design

Logical Design

Tenant Partitioning

The nature of cloud computing deployments requires sensitive data and application segregation. To accomplish this, there must be a logical design to the data center that segregates customer and client data. An approach that satisfies the needs of cloud computing is multitenant networks. The benefits of the multitenant network approach to data centers are:

• Smaller networks
• Isolated networks
• Segregation of customer and client data

Access Control

Logical design requires that design decisions are enforceable and monitored. A great example is access control, proper implementation of which would involve an auditable identity and access management system.

Logical Design Levels

Logical design with regard to data separation is required to be incorporated at all of the levels listed below:

• Management plane
• Compute nodes
• Storage nodes
• Control plane
• Network

Physical Design

Physical design of the data center is another important component to cloud computing.

Considerations

• Does the physical design of the data center protect against relevant (Read more...)