Gathering cloud service information

We next want to discover whether the target is using any cloud-based services. Based on the IP addresses we have found we can see if there are multiple different domain and host information associated with an individual IP Address which would indicate some form of cloud based service.

Cloud services come in several different forms and offerings. Cloud services originally started the as a service trend with Software as a Service (SaaS), such as Office 365 and Exchange 365 and a Platform as a Service (PaaS) like AWS and Azure. Today, many organizations rely on cloud-based systems. Sometimes, these systems are controlled, managed, and monitored as part of the data center infrastructure. At other times, this use is regarded as Shadow IT. Shadow IT refers to the services that are brought up outside the corporate IT environment and control. They are often used for development purposes or to actually get around restricts or delays based on standard corporate IT policies. These environments can be rich with information; in fact, some of the more recent breaches of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) have been from either unsecured or badly secured test applications, where they used real data in the databases.