Companies and consumers alike are increasingly turning to cloud infrastructures to store and protect their data. The cybersecurity risks associated with the technology are growing – and demand a more robust response from industry to confront them.
That’s according to University of Albany’s Suryadipta Majumdar, a coauthor of a book published in September on cloud security auditing.
Majumdar, an assistant professor of information security and digital forensics, said that the book addresses privacy and security concerns related to cloud platforms and solutions yet offers best practices and solutions to help businesses overcome them.
“We wanted to be able to provide a comprehensive research review as well as a reliable auditing framework that companies can use to be confident in their capacity to make their systems secure,” said Majumdar, whose research focuses on cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) systems and software-defined networking (SDN) security.
By analyzing OpenStack, an open-source platform for cloud computing, Majumdar and his colleagues developed a model of a proactive auditing system that could help companies predict breaches faster and sooner.
“We often think of auditing as being a slow and manual process that goes into effect after a security breach happens,” Majumdar said. “In this book, we were able to describe an automated security mechanism that would be able to warn of potential vulnerabilities before they happen and further enforce security auditing results to prevent any exploits.”
He said the book is designed for researchers and industrial scientists, as well as security practitioners, administrators, cloud providers and operators.
Majumdar said he began the book in 2015 as part of his doctorate dissertation with nine researchers from Concordia University and Ericsson Research Canada, with funding from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Ericsson Research Canada.
School of Business Dean Nilanjan Sen said that these types of collaborative projects demonstrate the School’s “dedication to providing research-based expertise and cutting-edge analysis to industry.”
The book, titled “Cloud Security Auditing,” was published by Springer International Publishing.
Republished courtesy of University of Albany. Photo: Suryadipta Majumdar is an assistant professor of information security and digital forensics at the University of Albany. Credit: Patrick Dodson