Expert Talk - Constanze Rödig "The challenge of designing secure cloud-services"

***** Talk
The challenges of designing defensible (k8s-based) cloud-services for research that can be operated in academia

Providing reasonably secure cloud infrastructure at affordable costs and without commercial license lock-in, is one of the primary goals of the Austrian Open Cloud Community in 2023.
Specifically for Kubernetes (k8s) as a service, you have to take into account the reality of academia when it comes to skill levels, mindsets and people-power of both admins and users.
From this perspective, Constanze explains how they layered a Defense-in-Depth approach, employed time-based security and how the design was tested. A comparison with current (private) sector best-practice will show which parts make sense in our setting.
Comparing blamelessly with similar (academic) projects that were built without a Security-first mindset show how much improvement can be achieved by the consistent application of “shifting-left” and what the most effective measures are that we can take in such a low-budget environment.

***** About the speaker
Constanze Roedig earned her doctorate at the Albert Einstein Institute (Max Planck) in relativistic radiation hydrodynamics and continued studying black holes at Johns Hopkins as a postdoc. She spent 8 years in the private sector as a software architect to enable companies to transition their internal systems towards transparent, performant and scalable designs. She views defensibility/security as a key pillar of good architecture and her research interest lies in the verifiability of (security)-guarantees in evolving systems.
The desire to give back to the community brought her back to science as the technical lead for an Austrian-wide digitalization project that in Jan 2023 founded the “Austrian Open Cloud Community”. She currently works with research groups to provide cloud services that abstract security and infrastructure from scientists, especially in the HPC field. But, she also works with Austrian universities to provide teaching/training materials such as gamified exams using “blue CTFs". The first examples are the TUW lecture “HandsOn CloudNative” this semester SS2023.

***** Agenda
17:30 Welcome
17:40 Expert Talk
Q&A
19:30 Community Topics
Looking forward to seeing you there!