Audit challenges in the cloud

An audit can be defined as conducting an official inspection of a particular service or a product.

In order to audit, there needs to be a well-defined document that contains a clear view of what exactly needs to be audited, how it needs to be audited, and that also defines the success and failure criteria for the audit.

During the times where an organization had on-premise servers, auditors had full visibility of the servers and networks and, also, the accountability. However, in the cloud, one doesn't really have any visibility about the underlying network and even the accountability is challenging. This makes auditing in the cloud a challenge for the auditors:

• Visibility: This is one of the major challenges for customers and auditors whenever they have their servers hosted in a cloud environment. Customer or auditor might want to evaluate the state of security of the data centers of CSP as well other security controls; however, CSP doesn't provide access to customers to their actual servers or data center facility.
• Transparency and accountability: In cloud environments, customers generally do not have any proper tracking of where exactly their data resides within a CSP environment. Customers would also like to understand the accountability of the protection of the customer's data and thus would need to understand the boundary between the CSP responsibility and customer's responsibility for the protection of data. There has to be a clear document stating who is responsible for what. This typically changes according to environments, as follows:
  • SaaS: CSP is responsible for the infrastructure, software, and back end data storage
  • PaaS: CSP responsible for infrastructure and platform but not application security
  • IaaS: Underlying infrastructure such as hypervisor is the responsibility of CSP, while OS is customer's responsibility

It is also important to understand how exactly CSP will protect the data and respond to the legal inquiry that might occur.