Design and Development of Cloud-Based Cyber Risk Assessment System for a Hybrid Data Center

Regardless of massive investment into complex and advanced computing infrastructure in Africa and Zimbabwe in particular, there is growing concern for the asymmetric development in comprehensive security systems to tally this thrust in technology investment. As Data Centres are deployed to solve complex industry and development problems in the country, the security infrastructure need to be considered as well by clearly applying identifiable cyber security risk management framework. This study therefore sought to:i.develop a cloud-based cyber security risk system to identify security vulnerabilities. ii estimate the Data centre aggregate risk score in realtime, and iii. Control identified threats. The results indicate that the proposed risk assessment framework is no like any of the surveyed past such frameworks but helps to complement such. It adds to the perspective of managing risks at hybrid data centres. Ability to capture the human perspectives through creation of comprehensive requirement. text files helps to capture not only the technical details of the threats but also considers the human perspectives enriching the way risk is calculated and defined. A hybrid data centres have no unique vulnerabilities and threats than other computing infrastructure. However, it seems some vulnerabilities and threats are more common for the data centres than other infrastructure. In this study, denial of service and malware are some of the threats which are peculiar to data centres. Furthermore, due to complexity in the mixture and combination of software and application suit at a data centre, the range of threats may not be predefined nor generalised from one centre to the other. Empirical testing and verification of these weaknesses need customised and personalised approach as indicated in this study. For a comprehensive risk assessment framework that does not capture computing-related threats and vulnerabilities, further research is pertinent that also captures the human perspectives and other security dimensions such as the physical and personal security issues at the data centre. Better future frameworks may need to incorporate not only the quantitative risk assessments but incorporate the qualitative elements to risk