Identification of Critical Security Issues for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a new service style with many significant advantages and becoming a trend in the world nowadays. Although cloud computing can provide many significant advantages, it also brings us new security problems which present strong barriers for individuals/enterprises to adapt into cloud computing. Including European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), many international organizations have issued their reports on the issue of cloud computing security. However, the identification of risks the cloud computing faces also mix with traditional security problems. In this paper, we aim at identifying the critical security issues which are cloud computing-designated. The results of our identification are divided into three categories, namely, policy and organizational, technical, and legal issues, which were adopted by ENISA. We also carefully analyzed the literature on cloud computing security to identify critical cloud computing-designated risk items for each category. Detailed explanations about how the risk items were identified as the critical cloud computing-designated ones are also given to show the adequacy of the proposed identifications. Most of the cloud computing-designated security issues pointed out in this paper is still open and can be taken into consideration for cloud computing service providers when designing a new cloud computing technique.