Cloud Computing Security: An Issue of Concern

Cloud computing is an emerging technology exemplar that migrate current technological and computing concepts into utility-like solutions. Cloud computing as a ubiquitous on-demand model for accessing common resources over a network. The main idea of cloud computing is to deliver both software and hardware as services. Clouds bring out a wide range of benefits including configurable computing resources, economic savings, and service flexibility. However, security and privacy concerns are shown to be the issues of great concern to a wide adoption of clouds. The new concepts that clouds introduce, such as multi-tenancy, resource sharing and outsourcing, create new challenges to the security community. Addressing these challenges requires, in addition to the ability to grow and tune the security measures developed for traditional computing systems, proposing new security policies, models, and protocols to address the unique cloud security challenges. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of cloud computing security and privacy concerns. We identify cloud vulnerabilities, classify known security threats and attacks, and present the state-of-the-art practices to control the vulnerabilities, neutralize the threats, and calibrate the attacks. Additionally, we investigate and identify the limitations of the current solutions and provide insights of the future security perspectives.

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