Cloud Challenges : Security And Privacy

Cloud computing has set a trend in the information technology arena that has sparked the interest of all who utilize the internet on purpose and unsuspectingly. Initially, the primary purpose of cloud computing was to provide a centralized data bank that organizations could use for quick data access. Its use has been quickly adapted, however, beyond business use to become the first option for personal use. The advantages and disadvantages of implementing such a shift from business to personal are varied, yet, statistically, according to the CISCO Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2014-2019 White Paper, its public use is on the rise. The report notes that “by 2019, 56 percent of the cloud workloads will be in public cloud data centers, up from 30 percent in 2014 and by 2019, 44 percent of the cloud workloads will be in private cloud data centers, down from 70 percent in 2014”. Though disadvantages with regard to data security is prominent, users have deemed that its implementation will still promote greater benefits than loss.

This research paper tackles the issues that faces Cloud Computing today and gives the experts and industry’s point of view on the matter. The aspects explored are the significant industry questions that have risen about the use of Cloud Computing, business value, organization impact, adaptability, limitations, initial cost of implementation, and the severe business security risks

The use of cloud computing creates a growing interdependence among both public and private sector entities and the individuals served by these entities. This paper provides a snapshot of the advantages of cloud computing and the risk areas specific to cloud services which clients of cloud services should be aware of. The future of cloud computing is certainly exciting, but moving more of our lives online means we will inevitably have to consider the consequences. Cloud computing means dependence on others and that could limit our privacy because

Despite these advantages, cloud computing carries with it some inherent risks that need to be evaluated before a firm makes the decision to adopt this computing model. In order to eschew the in-house data center and IT department for a cloud-based solution, a business must hand over its most sensitive data to a third party service provider—this requirement carries with it major drawbacks, as we will see. A recently conducted survey of nearly 300 IT Experts done by the Journal of Computer Information Systems found the three primary concerns are loss governance, service availability, and information security (Dutta, Peng, & Choudhary, 2013).

Cloud services: The organizations have been highly dependent on the cloud services. The cybercriminals have been seeking ways to exploit corporate security policies for protecting cloud services. The cloud services have been providing immense risk of data being disclosed deliberately or accidentally. The hosting companies have a greater ease of control over the private data and information and can even communicate between the end user and access his user data even without his permission. Therefore this threat has to be placed at the highest priority. Additionally, the cloud providers have the authority to the share information with any of the third parties even without any warrant. All these activities poses privacy concerns as the data can be access on the cloud anywhere and anytime where the information can be deleted, or even altered. All these activities have further left a room for potential unwanted disclosure of data and information on the cloud. Thus using cloud services in an organization poses a threat to exploitation and stealing of confidential data by their competitors, cybercriminals and vigilante justice seekers (Shaikh, F. B., & Haider, S., 2011).

The topic of the cloud computing industry and security is broad with far reaching intricacies. Therefore, to narrow the subject, the definition of cloud computing as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (NIST Special Publication 800-145, 2011) will be used as the foundation for this study. The NIST adopted the (Mell & Grance, 2010) cloud computing definition in 2011. (Mell & Grance, (2010)) defined cloud computing as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service-provider interaction (Mell & Grance, (2010)).

Cloud Computing is considered the latest buzzword in computing today. It describes a form of computing wherein services are accessed through the Internet on an as needed or pay-per-use basis. Some aspect of cloud computing is in use on a regular basis. Understanding this technology, its benefits, and underlying security risks are important for people in most of today’s technical areas. Because Cloud computing is still considered to be in its infancy, an introduction to cloud computing, defining its major components, with a focus on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), is the foremost theme of this paper. There are three major elements of cloud computing - Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and

What is cloud computing? Cloud computing is a new process of managing, storing, and accessing data and programs over the internet instead of through a local computer hard drive or office network. (Griffith, 2016). A newer process developed in the early 2000’s to better help organizations as technology continues to evolve. Cloud computing is having the ability to access your information through an internet connection from anywhere at any time (Griffith, 2016). Of course, as with most all technology there are many advantages as well as disadvantages. Throughout this paper we will look at some of the top advantages and disadvantages that come with the process of utilizing cloud computing.

Cloud computing is becoming the most popular topic in the realm of Information technology. Its popularity stems from the ability to allow with limited knowledge, to be able to access their information anytime and anywhere while reducing overhead and costs. Additionally, reduces the need for backups; this is because backups are done automatically, between different servers in the “cloud”. Even with the obscurity, cloud computing is really just a way to outsource computing resources, and have a third party maintain and upgrade them. Allowing companies to avoid the upfront investment in hardware and labor. Even though cloud computing may seem like a silver bullet to a company, cloud computing presents a whole new set of very serious risks

Cloud Computing is a process collecting the existing techniques and technologies , packaged within a new infrastructure that offers improved scalability , rapidly respond to change , faster start up time , reduced management costs and availability of resources for a short span of time .

Usage of remote servers via internet to store, manage and process data instead of using a personal computer is known as Cloud computing. It’s a set of Information Technology services with the ability to scale up or down their service requirements. Most of the cloud services are provided by a third party service provider. In cloud computing, organizations can utilize IT services without in advance investment. Despite its benefits obtained from the cloud computing, the organizations are slow in accepting it due to security issues and challenges. Security is one of the major problems which hinder the growth of cloud. It’s not wise to handing over the important data to another company; such that clients need to be vigilant in understanding the risks of data infringement in this new environment. This paper discusses a detailed analysis of the cloud computing security issues and challenges. (Ayoleke)

Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing services over the internet. It is the use of computing services over the web located in another site or provided by a third party vendor as opposed to using one’s own hard disk, personal computer or server. Cloud services allow individuals and business organizations to exploit software and hardware that are set up by third parties at remote locations. Therefore, we can define cloud computing as computing services where a broad set of systems are connected to private or public networks, to provide dynamically quantifiable infrastructure for application, data, and file storage (Kling 2014).

Cloud computing has drawn attentions from academia, industries, tech-savvy individuals and analytic firms. This positive attitude towards cloud computing resulted in numerous definitions.

Therefore, all organizations or businesses are looking to take advantage of cloud technology to make better use of resources and reduce storage costs. It has different types of clouds and public, private and hybrid clouds.

“Cloud computing” simply means “Internet computing “, generally the internet is seen as collection of clouds; thus the word cloud computing can be defined as utilizing the internet to provide technology enabled services to the people and organizations[1]. Cloud computing is a powerful emerging service that provides an optimized and efficient computing platform by using sharing and virtualization concepts and improving availability, scalability, collaboration and agility for users and enterprises [2]. Cloud computing has a rapid growth in IT industries due to the considerable benefits of sorting and maintaining resources in unlimited storages with the most cost efficient method, business continuity and scalability [3]. However, the only hurdle in wide adoption of this newfound technology is lack of security especially in data protection, authentication, and data transmission subject [4].