A data-centric view of cloud security

Cloud computing offers a massive pool of resources and services that cloud users can utilize for storing and processing their data. The users can flexibly control and reduce their operational expenditures, whereas resources provisioned from the clouds can be dynamically resized to meet their demand and especially budgets. The user, however, has to consider unanticipated and expensive costs from threats associated with attacks aiming for the user's data in the cloud. In this chapter, we discuss the primary causes of new attack vectors that create a multitude of data security issues in clouds. We also discuss specific data security challenges in clouds and provide a classification which can help in an easier understanding.