OpenStack Governance & Compliance

OpenStack Governance

The OpenStack Foundation’s bylaws legally describe the two distinct governance bodies that oversee the OpenStack project. The User Committee, which was formerly managed separately from the Technical Committee but was essentially combined into just one elected governance body in August 2020, is defined as a third body in the bylaws.

Board of Directors

The OpenStack Foundation and the Resources it safeguards including the OpenStack trademark are under the direction of the OpenStack Board of Directors. It is made up of designated solitary representatives, elected representatives from Gold Sponsors, and appointed representatives from Platinum sponsors. The Bord wiki page has additional details regarding the conferences and proceedings of the OpenStack Board of Directors.

Technical Crew 

The OpenStack open-source project is governed by the OpenStack Technical Committee. It oversees all technical issues and is elected directly by all project participants. This covers the software creators, administrators, and final users. Discover additional details about the OpenStack open source project which is governed by the OpenStack Technical Committee such as its bylaws, current membership, reference materials, and previous resolutions. 

Project Squads 

Working groups known as project teams are in charge of producing open-stack software releases. They may do this by developing and maintaining particular components or by managing common development tasks like quality assurance and release management. 

SIGs 

Working groups known as SIGs ( Special Interest Groups) are not directly in charge of creating any particular OpenStack software. Through the formation of a guild of individuals with a common interest, SIGs focus their activities on a topic or practice that affects the entire community, including developers, operators, and end users.

Elections 

Elections are used to periodically re-elect Openstack governance bodies and leaders. Learn more about elections for Technical Committees and project teams by members of the community.

Concepts

All new ideas for worldwide modifications to OpenStack are welcome in the ideas repository, according to the OpenStack Technical Compliance Committee. modified if act about a single official project ought to be addressed directly with the project swuaabouto a single official project ought to be addressed directly with the project squad.

OpenStack Compliance

Compliance actions may be necessary for an OpenStack deployment for a variety of reasons, including legal and regulatory requirements, customer needs, privacy concerns, and security best practices. Both the organization and its clients benefit from the compliance function. Compliance refers to following rules, guidelines, laws, and specifications. It is also employed to describe the current state of an organization’s endorsements, audits, and evaluations. When compliance is carried out properly, it reinforces and unites the other security.  

Principles of Security

Security principles that are industry standard serve as a foundation for accreditation and endorsements of compliance. During an OpenStack execution, if these guidelines are kept in mind and referred to, certification procedures might get easier.

Layered Protections

Locate risk areas in a cloud architecture and implement controls to reduce the risk. Layered offerses offer several complementary controls to reduce risk to a manageable level in areas of great concern. For instance, we advise hardening QEMU, utilizing a hypervisor with SELinux support, implementing required authentication policies, and minimizing the threat shown to guarantee appropriate segregation between cloud tenants. The fundamental idea is to fortify a vulnerable area with several layers of defense so that if one layer is breached, other layers will still be there to provide protection of lower exposure.

Safely Quit

Systems ought to be set up to give up into a closed, safe state in the event of a malfunction. For instance, if the CNAME does not match the server’s DNS name, TLS certificate authentication ought to be closed and the network connection should be served. In this scenario, software frequently fails open, enabling the association to continue without a CNAME match, which is less safe and not advised.

The Least Reputation

For users and system services, only the bare minimum level of accessibility is allowed. The position, accountability, and job function are the basis for this access. The least privilege security principle is outlined in several international government security policies, including NIST 800-53 Section AC-6 in the US.

Divide into Sections

Systems ought to be divided so that the protection of the other systems will not be jeopardised in the event that one device, of system level service, is impaired. M actuality, SELinux’s proper usage and activation aid in achieving this objective.

Encourage Personal Space

Reducing the amount of data that can be obtained about a system and its users is a good notion.

Potential to Keep Track

To keep an eye out for unauthorized utilization, response to incidents, and forensics, suitable logging is put into place. It is strongly advised that certain audit subsystems obtain common criteria certifications, as this offers nonfat testable event documents in the majority of nations.

Common Control Frameworks 

An organization can use the Control Frameworks listed below to create its security controls.

Common.Control Matrix ( CCM) of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA)

The CSA CCM is specially made to offer basic security guidelines to cloud providers and help potential cloud users evaluate the general safety risk of a cloud provider. A control framework that coincides across 16 security domains is provided by the CSA CCM. The Cloud Controls matrix is based on a customized association with other industry standards, laws, and models for controls, including AICPA 2014 Trust Service Principles and Standards, ISO 27001:2013, COBIT 5.0, PCI: DSS v3, and more.

It also enhances internal control guidance for service organization control report declarations.  By strengthening current information security control, by making it possible to lower hazards and weaknesses in security in the cloud, the CSA CCM improves already-existing information security control environments.

It also offers standardized security and operational risk management and works to standardize security desires, cloud categorization and concepts, and security measures put in place in the cloud. 

ISO 2700 ½: 2013

For several years, organizations have used the ISO 27001 Information Security standard and certification to assess and identify how well they adhere to information security best practices. The standard is divided into two sections: Annex A, which has a list of controls arranged by domain, and Mandatory Clauses, which characterize the Information Security Management System ( ISMS). By using risk mitigation procedures, the information security management system protects the privacy, security, and accessibility of data and reassures interested parties that risks are appropriately managed.

Dependable Security Guidelines

Trust Services is a collection of expert endorsement and consulting services that tackle the potential hazards associated with IT-enabled systems and privacy initiatives. They are founded on a fundamental set of principles and criteria. Often referred to as SOC audits, the fundamentals,  and the organisations duty to specify the control that satisfies the prerequisite.

Reference Audit

In multiple ways, OpenStack is groundbreaking but the procedure for auditing an Openstack deployment is rather standard. Two factors will be considered by auditors when assessing a process: the effectiveness of the controls design and it’s operation. We’ll talk about how an auditor determines whether a control is well-designed and functioning in understanding the audit process section.

The most widely used frameworks for assessing and auditing cloud deployments are the Information Technology Infrastructure Library ( ITIL), the previously mentioned ISO 27001/2 Information Security standard, ISACA Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology ( COBIT) framework, and the Committee of sponsoring organisations of the Treadway Commission ( COSO). It is typical for audits to incorporate priority fields from one or more.

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