Every technology comes with its own set of complexities and challenges, and there is always a good and bad side of every technological evolution. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing.

Advantages:

• Modernization and innovation: The cloud promotes new innovations. Cloud service providers investing in advanced infrastructural features allows researchers and enthusiasts to research and innovate new solutions, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), robotics, and so on.
• Scalability: Clearly, a huge advantage of adopting the cloud for organizations is easier scalability of resources. Storage and computational power can be scaled up or down to suit the needs of the organization, applications, or user demands, and all this without any significant hardware or software investments. Cloud scalability is particularly useful for deploying endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools...

In today’s world, there are many services that are virtualized and can be made available in the cloud. The cloud offers scalability of resources and cost-effectiveness, which have been key to its success.

Generally, cloud computing is offered in the following service models:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): IaaS provides users with access to virtualized resources such as servers, operating systems, storage, and networking. With IaaS, users are also allowed to customize their infrastructure. For example, they can enable storage encryption or configure the server to access a particular segment of the cloud network. This setup is typically applied by organizations who have their corporate data in the cloud and want to safeguard it from being generally accessible on the internet. It is also a security best practice to only allow cloud resources to access specific network connections, including corporate networks. In IaaS, users can create...

It is important to understand that cloud services can be deployed through various means and have forensic implications for investigators. These models are a framework for how these services are hosted and delivered to users. We can typically classify cloud deployment into four different models: public, private, hybrid, and community models:

• Public cloud: The most popular option for all users and service providers is a public cloud model. In this model, service providers can deliver their applications over a commonly used infrastructure. Typically, the public cloud is used for non-critical tasks, or by developers to develop and test their applications on a public cloud tenant. Some of the public cloud offerings could also include services such as file hosting services, file sharing services, and email services. In some cases, public cloud services are offered over multiple cloud service providers, for example, a public cloud application that is deployed...

Many organizations h1ave adopted the cloud as their primary center to provide services to their customers. It is essential to understand how cloud infrastructure and applications differ from traditional on-premises IT environments and how to respond to incidents effectively in the cloud. By studying cloud adoption success stories, security professionals can learn about emerging cloud implementation trends and the associated threats and how to proactively address them.

The following case studies include some of the many examples of organizations that utilize the cloud for their business needs:

• A large global entertainment streaming platform: This large streaming enterprise adopted the cloud, specifically AWS, to provide its streaming services to end users. As one of the world’s leading streaming providers, with more than 200 million members from 190 countries with more than 125 million hours of viewing, it uses AWS for storage, computation...

Cloud computing has had a significant impact on industries, the economy, and, most importantly, end users. Similar related technological innovations in ML, blockchain and cryptography, the Internet of Things (IoT), and so on have changed the way we utilize the cloud. The following are some of the impacts of related technological innovations and the cloud:

• Containers: Containers are applications and associated dependencies packaged into a portable and lightweight unit that can be deployed and scaled quickly and efficiently. In cloud computing, containers can be used to enable microservices-based architectures, improve application performance and reliability, and enhance DevOps processes. The use of containers has also enabled container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, which automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. These tools provide a way to manage large-scale container deployments and...

This was a quick refresher on cloud computing, including its basic concepts, the cloud’s evolution throughout the years, and the benefits of cloud computing. Additionally, this chapter discussed various deployment models, including public, private, and hybrid clouds, as well as various service models such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Understanding cloud computing is crucial for incident response professionals, as it has become an essential part of modern technology, and many organizations have adopted cloud-based solutions to store and process their data. It is therefore a complex infrastructure and having a sound understanding of how a cloud tenant can be set up in various forms and its complexities can help incident responders to effectively respond to security incidents and investigate in a forensically sound manner.

In the next chapter, we will learn about legal complexities and DFIR impacts as we learn about how to navigate jurisdiction and privacy regulations...

• Introduction to Cloud: https://www.coursera.org/learn/introduction-to-cloud
• Bank of Canada Government skills program: https://customers.microsoft.com/en-ca/story/1560503487084546279-bankofcanada-government-canada-skills-program
• What is cloud computing? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-cloud-computing#:~:text=Simply%20put%2C%20cloud%20computing%20is,resources%2C%20and%20economies%20of%20scale.
• What is cloud computing? https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/
• What is cloud computing? https://www.ibm.com/topics/cloud-computing
• What is Platform as a Service? PaaS examples + SaaS versus PaaS versus IaaS https://www.zendesk.com/blog/what-is-paas/