Securing VMs

Each cloud provider has its own implementation of VMs (or virtual servers), but at the end of the day, the basic idea is the same:

1. Select a machine type (or size) – a ratio between the amount of virtual CPU (vCPU) and memory, according to their requirements (general-purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, and so on).
2. Select a preinstalled image of an operating system (from Windows to Linux flavors).
3. Configure storage (adding additional volumes, connecting to file sharing services, and others).
4. Configure network settings (from network access controls to micro-segmentation, and others).
5. Configure permissions to access cloud resources.
6. Deploy an application.
7. Begin using the service.
8. Carry out ongoing maintenance of the operating system.

According to the shared responsibility model, when using IaaS, we (as the customers) are responsible for the deployment and maintenance of virtual servers, as explained in the coming...