ISC CCSP - Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP)

Measured service is where cloud services are delivered and billed in a metered way, where the cloud customer only pays for those that they actually use, and for the duration of time that they use them.

The best practice is to totally remove any unneeded services and utilities on a system to prevent any chance of compromise or use. If they are just disabled, it is possible for them to be inadvertently started again at any point, or another exploit could be used to start them again. Removing also negates the need to patch and maintain them going forward.

Within IaaS, the number of users on a system is not relevant to the particular hosting model in regard to cloud resources. IaaS is focused on infrastructure needs of a system or application. Therefore, a factor such as the number of users that could affect licensing requirements, for example, would apply to the SaaS model, or in some instances to PaaS.

The Uptime Institute publishes the most commonly used and widely known standard on data center tiers and topologies. It is based on a series of four tiers, with each progressive increase in number representing more stringent, reliable, and redundant systems for security, connectivity, fault tolerance, redundancy, and cooling.

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) are the most commonly used data formats for the Representational State Transfer (REST) API, and are typically implemented with caching for increased scalability and performance.

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST) are the most commonly used APIs within a cloud environment. Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) are both standards for exchanging encoded data between two parties, with XML being for more general use and SAML focused on authentication and authorization data.

The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act is not an act that pertains to privacy or IT security directly, but rather regulates accounting and financial practices used by organizations. It was passed to protect stakeholders and shareholders from improper practices and errors, and it sets forth rules for compliance, regulated and enforced by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The main influence on IT systems and operations is the requirements it sets for data retention, specifically in regard to what types of records must be preserved and for how long.

The AICPA is the organization responsible for generating and maintaining what are the Generally Accepted Accounting Practices in the United States.

Popular services such as iCloud, Dropbox, and OneDrive are all publicly available and are open to any user for free, with possible add-on services offered for a cost.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires the U.S. Federal Department of Health and Human Services to publish and enforce regulations pertaining to electronic health records and identifiers between patients, providers, and insurance companies. It is focused on the security controls and confidentiality of medical records, rather than the specific technologies used, so long as they meet the requirements of the regulations.

Security misconfigurations occur when applications and systems are not properly configured or maintained in a secure manner. This can be caused from a shortcoming in security baselines or configurations, unauthorized changes to system configurations, or a failure to patch and upgrade systems as the vendor releases security patches.

Type 1 hypervisors run directly on top of the bare metal and only contain the code and functions required to perform their purpose. They do not rely on any other systems or contain extra features to secure.