Harden your Bastion or Move away !!

         The bastion host toplogy is well suited for relatively simple networks (e.g. those that don't offer any public Internet services.) The key factor to keep in mind is that it offers only a single boundary. Once someone manages to penetrate that boundary, they've gained unrestricted (at least from a perimeter protection perspective) access to the protected network. 

Two questions to those who are using bastion in their environment:

• Is it protected from attackers?
• When it is compromised, will the integrity of the internal network still be protected?

"Anyone with a Screwdriver Can Break In"

The bastion model does have following downsides:

1. Bastion must be managed and patched.
2. It accrues cost while it is running.
3. Each of your security groups that allow bastion access require a security group ingress rule, normally port 22 for SSH or port 3389 for RDP.
4. Private RSA keys for the bastion host and application hosts need to be managed, protected, and rotated.
5. SSH activity isn’t natively logged.

"System logs are invaluable tools for detecting and terminating attacks"

Harden your Bastion - Ensure you haven't left a hole:

1. Enforce - Two factor Authentication
2. Implement Fail2ban - Restrict against automated SSH attempts if your Bastion IP's are red-handed
3. Disable all non-required services 

Establish a Bastion Baseline:

1. Monitoring processor utilization to see the current system loads
2. Analysing system logs to understand how the system runs normally - Enable in-depth logging 
3. Run network weakness scanners such as NESSUS,NAMAP,SATAN
4. Ensure your Operating system is frequently updated with latest Patches,Service packs and Software upgrades. 

The Solution:

Move away from Bastion!!

If your Bastion is not hardened or failed to establish a recommened baselines yet - Jump out of Jump Host and prefer any of following natively secured topologies. 

1. Replace a Bastion Host with Amazon EC2 Systems Manager
2. Using OpenVPN Server

AWS vs Azure - Battle of the Clouds

Preface:

Microsoft’s Azure & Amazon’s AWS cloud platforms are the top choices when it comes to Enterprise-level IaaS.

Both the platforms offers largely similar basic capabilities around flexible Computing, Storage, and Networking. They also share the common elements of a public cloud such as Self-service, Instant provisioning, Auto scaling,Security, Compliance, and Identity management features etc.,

Enterprise Public Cloud Adoption:

AWS continues to lead in public cloud adoption but Azure continues to grow quickly, reducing AWS’s lead, especially among enterprises.

Overall Azure adoption grew from 34 to 45 percent of respondents, while AWS grew from 57 to 64 percent of respondents.

Among enterprises, Azure did even better: Azure increased adoption significantly from 43 percent to 58 percent while AWS adoption in this group increased from 59 percent to 68 percent

PROS & CONS:

AWS CONS	Azure PROS
Incompatible and Weak Hybrid Strategy: AWS is less open to Private clouds, forcing companies to forego their own cloud infrastructure. This makes it an unpopular storage option for sensitive industries like banking, healthcare etc.	Open to Hybrid Cloud Systems: Azure offers substantial support for hybrid cloud applications and helps companies protect their client's information that could be sensitive in nature.
Large and Complex Scale of Offerings: AWS has a vast range of products to offer its users. However, to be able to navigating through these products and choosing what is suitable to one's requirements is a tiresome work.	Ease of Transition: Most organizations use Microsoft to run their on-premise systems. Therefore, these organizations will find transition to the cloud system easier.

AWS PROS	Azure CONS
Data is easily available: AWS has several availability zones, so users can choose to store data closer to them and save money.	Low Quality Support: Azure services are laden with glitches. To fix these bugs, users have to spend additional money.
High Transfer Stability: Minimal data is lost during server and storage transfer (SnowMobile, Snowball Direct connect)	Restrictive Platform: Less flexibility with regard to non-windows platforms,when compared to AWS.

AWS is clearly on higher ground, But does Azure stand a chance ?? Here it is.....

AWS Vs Azure: The Bottom Line

Azure and AWS both have global footprints and continue to compete in terms of their cloud feature sets:

• AWS tends to lead in terms of the variety of its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings
• Azure has a strong platform as a service (PaaS) portfolio.

Azure Vs AWS: Features

All features offered on Azure have a corresponding or similar feature on AWS. It is difficult to come up with an exhaustive features list and you might find it interesting that some Azure services have no AWS equivalent.

• Azure includes the Azure Visual Studio Online, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Event Hubs, and Azure Scheduler.
• The Disaster Recovery Planning service in Azure is more efficient than AWS Disaster Recovery.
• Hybrid clouds are easier with Azure, partly because Microsoft has foreseen the need for hybrid clouds early on.
• Amazon realizes that it needs to strengthen its offerings to support hybrid clouds, it is still catching up, with more investments earmarked for hybrid clouds.

Highlights - Azure :

• Azure has advantage in that it allows deploying Windows client apps with a RemoteApp service which the AWS lacks.
• For Windows-centric development or hosting, Azure offers slightly better options – Visual Studio, .NET and Windows programming languages such as VB and Visual C++ are all fully supported and well integrated.
• Azure’s service endpoints and firewalls are available for its cloud service Azure Storage at no additional billing to its customers. Service endpoints provide a direct connection from a network to an Azure service, such as storage, securing the data for the customer.
• Overpaying - AWS offers a plethora of various EC2 virtual machines under several billing approaches and these configurations are not customizable.

Recent Q1 FY 2018 earnings report, Microsoft's revenue from Azure grew over 90% this year, doubling the growth rate of AWS. 

Conclusion:  Rise or Fall?

What will come next??

In 2015, no one thought Azure could catch up; but they’ve proven the naysayers wrong. The cloud wars are unpredictable and exciting. Who would you count on - AWS or Azure? Will Azure overtake AWS? Will Google Cloud be the underdog that will disrupt the cloud domain? Only time will tell. 

"But one thing is certain - cloud is here to stay"

Sources:

https://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-industry-insights/cloud-computing-trends-2018-state-cloud-survey#azure-grows

https://www.simplilearn.com/aws-vs-azure-cloud-certification-article

https://stackify.com/azure-vs-aws-comparison/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/overview/azure-vs-aws/

Zero Touch-Up in Operations - AIOps

AIOps or Algorithmic IT Operations, is a solution that uses smart algorithms (powered by AI and ML) in which machines solve known IT issues and intelligently automate repetitive and mundane jobs — Gartner

AIOps platforms encompass the IT disciplines of Performance Management, Service Management, Automation, and Process Improvement, along with technologies such as monitoring, service desk, capacity management, cloud computing, SaaS, mobility, IoT and more.

See-Analyze-Automate — Approach

See-Analyze-Automate — Approach

Visibility— Monitoring systems monitor everything going on currently in the environment and the predictive analytics systems monitors and based on past trends, it tries to forecast what is going to happen. It can predict if a negative trend or an incident is about to happen.

Prediction— Once the system has this ability, then it will be able to alert the operation team and also automatically assign appropriate pre-automated solution to solve the issues. As a result, the issues will be identified and addressed in advance before they occur.

Automation — Of-course, if there are no automated solutions in place, the operation team can automate the process using RPA’s (Robotic Process Automation tools). So that, when the next time, an accident happens, it will be resolved automatically.

This process obviously goes on circular basis, if we repeat it over a period of time, eventually we will get hand full of benefits in operations, on the following aspects as the end result.

• Reduced MTTD and Faster MTTR
• Greater Visibility
• Real-Time Analysis
• Data-Driven Recommendations

--The Future--

AIOps is a rapidly developing area. Current AIOps systems struggle to understand the relationships between applications, infrastructure, and other datasets. Looking to the future by applying AI to IT operations, IT issues become easier to identify, predict, prevent, and even fix.

References:

https://dzone.com/articles/aiops-how-ai-and-automation-are-transforming-busin

https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2017-04-11-gartner-says-algorithmic-it-operations-drives-digital-business