A review on cloud security issues and solutions

Cloud computing is a new computing model which uses virtualization technology, distributed computing, parallel computing and other existing technologies to achieve cloud service virtualization and economies of scale, whilst increasingly overwhelming cloud security issues has brought great challenges and concerns to the cloud services providers and cloud users, especially trust and privacy issues with regard to cloud computing and cloud shared storage associated security issues. In the paper, we expound the basic concepts of cloud computing, deployment models, service models and key features, analyze and outline the currently highlighted cloud security issues, report the status quo of cloud computing security, investigate the prevalent and typical cloud computing security problem key solving techniques, and thus render a comprehensive cloud computing security technical reference model, which is composed of associated cloud security solving techniques that result from inevitably multi-faceted cloud security issues. The model is expected to alleviate prominent cloud security issues. This paper generalizes cloud security technology research directions and further development space of cloud security technology and standardization.KeywordsCloud computingSecurity issuesTrusted cloud computing solving techniquesShared storage security solving techniquesCloud security technical reference model

Cloud computing platform provides on-demand access of services, and these services can also be customised, which enables the customers to use these services as per their requirement and they also need to pay according to their uses. Recent advancements in the field of cloud computing and internet technologies have attracted the organisations to shift their businesses on cloud. However, moving data and applications to a third party services provider also raises critical concern for security and privacy. Availability of cloud services is one of the most important security issues which directly affect the business of the cloud service providers and also its customers. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on cloud is the root cause that challenges the availability of cloud services. This paper presents taxonomy of security issues in cloud, taxonomy of DDoS attacks in cloud, and taxonomy of DDoS defence mechanisms in cloud environment. We have also discussed, analysed, and compared some well-known methods for DDoS attack defence in cloud on different parameters that will help the victim to understand the risk and also assists them to select the proper defence technique to protect their cloud system from DDoS attacks.

Despite the promising application of cloud computing within government organisations, determining the barriers to the successful implementation of cloud computing remains a major challenge. Often, government organisations face formidable barriers to fully adopting cloud computing functions. These barriers include organisational culture issues, a weak application of service-level agreements (SLAs), compliance issues, interoperability and integration issues, the lack of an organisational strategy, cost calculation methods, cloud service availability, and cloud data security and privacy, as well as insufficient trust in providers. Tackling these barriers while meeting the specifications of government cloud computing involves architectural requirements and mechanisms. In addition, the nature of cloud ecosystem operation and its alignment with appropriate strategies are known to be complex, also considering the growing desire for governance solutions. Although researchers and organisations have recognised cloud computing obstacles prior to the cloud implementation stage, fewer efforts have been made to investigate cloud barriers in-depth during and after cloud implementation projects or when introducing governance solutions. This might partly be attributable to inadequate enterprise requirements for addressing cloud barriers, the complexity of government cloud specifications, and the lack of involvement by cloud stakeholders, such as providers and consumers. Thus, the aim of this dissertation is to develop a governance method consisting of the generation and testing of architectural requirements to overcome dominant cloud barriers and improve cloud computing functionalities in the implementation stage. To achieve this, the roles of related cloud providers and consumers have been investigated. The study was guided by activities of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) Architecture Development Method (ADM) to design related architectural requirements that would provide best practices for the development of the governance method. Using a sequential, exploratory mixed method, multiple qualitative case studies on the role of cloud providers were conducted to explore which and how architectural requirements are suitable and applicable for addressing the identified cloud barriers. Afterwards, a quantitative survey study was performed to examine and validate the findings from the qualitative phase and to discover the role of cloud consumers in tackling cloud barriers. The utilisation of dual perspectives, from cloud providers and consumers, to design and measure the suitability and applicability of the architectural requirements is a substantial theoretical contribution in the field of enterprise information systems and cloud governance. Both cloud providers and consumers in the selected research context balanced their roles in the composition of cloud ecosystem projects, reducing complexity and enabling cooperative solutions for handling cloud barriers with different levels of emphasis and prioritisation. The results of this thesis provide significant guidance in eliciting architectural requirements as well as in their successful contribution to addressing the 10 identified cloud barriers in the selected context. Seeking a cloud provider’s perspective through multiple case studies resulted in 24 confirmed, newly emerged architectural requirements and 48 sub-requirements for best practices to support Information Technology (IT) managers and practitioners during the implementation of government cloud projects. From the point of view of the cloud service consumer, statistical evidence showed that the architectural requirements proved to be relevant and applicable and resulted in the validation of only eight important cloud constructs with a scale of 36 architectural requirements. The results at the governance level also produced a clear method that can enhance the realisation of value when business/IT strategies and EA governance practices both take place in cloud projects. The governance method also consists of a set of architectural requirements to support managing and controlling cloud computing implementation projects with related stakeholders and change management initiatives. The architectural requirements have been modelled via the ArchiMate 3.0 modelling language as unique and beneficial contributions for the enhancement of enterprise architecture practices. This thesis thereby introduces a novel cloud governance method with clear mechanisms and practices to serve as crucial resources for related organisations, decision-makers, business practitioners and researchers.

Cloud computing provides a way to deliver a variety of services through the internet. These services mainly include servers, storage, computing, networks, and so on. Cloud computing has brought massive changes to the way resources and data can be managed. Hence, many organizations and individuals are adopting cloud technology for storing their data and are accessing different resources from the cloud. The only concern for large-scale adoption of the cloud is the security issue. It will be always challenging to select a trustworthy cloud service among the large pool of available services. In this chapter, a trust-based cloud service selection mechanism is proposed. The proposed method computes the trustworthiness of cloud service by considering its performance and recommendations. Also, a method to compute trust values for the cloud users on basis of behaviour and recommendation is proposed. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of sensor nodes that monitor the surrounding environment and collect a large amount of data. In this chapter, an integrated framework for WSNs and cloud computing is proposed so that the data is stored efficiently in the cloud and accessed by trustworthy users and services. The major contribution of the chapter is to integrate machine learning techniques with the traditional trust model to improve the performance of trust evaluation. The fuzzy-c means algorithm is applied to compute the trust levels for cloud services and cloud users. The results show that the proposed method performs better than the existing relevant techniques.

Accessing data from social networks using cloud computing has been adopted by many IT enthusiasts. It allows easy access to data and easy sending of data for communication purposes. For many social network users, cloud computing can simplify processes and save time and money. This article defines cloud computing and shows how one can quickly, safely and easily access data. It also discusses how cloud computing solutions could be beneficial to libraries in these basic areas: technology and acquisition.Today’s more libraries and social networks are joining the cloud. But despite the numerous social networks and data acquisition sites demand for data are still escalating—as they always will. To be able to access data conveniently today’s data competitiveness users of search engines must carefully scrutinize various libraries as well as social media to ensure that they match key data and communication needs and deliver intended results in the most efficient and cost-effective way. To meet these challenges, IT organizations are increasingly moving away from a device-centric view of IT, to a view that is application-, information- and people-centric. Cloud computing aligns with this new world view. Cloud computing technology is enabling IT to do more with the infrastructure that already exists, as well as adding new ways to expand capacity quickly and economically by using external cloud computing resources. This technology is enabling IT managers to treat infrastructure as a common substrate on which they can provision services to users faster in a much more flexible and cost-effective way –without having to re-design or add to the underlying infrastructure. Given the benefits of cloud computing, its broad appeal is not surprising. However, this new approach does raise some concerns. Chief among them is securing data in the cloud. This white paper will briefly review the basic fundamentals of cloud computing and describe how virtualization are enabling enterprises to move toward a flexible, federated computing model with a cohesive mix of private external and internal cloud environments. It then discusses the security implications of cloud computing and provides insights into addressing them, and offers a view of security best practices to adopt when considering cloud services.Cloud computing has become an increasingly popular means of delivering valuable, IT-enabled business services. Adopting cloud technology can be an affordable way to get access to a dynamically scalable, virtualized computing environment. Optimal IT hardware, software, expertise and infrastructure management resources that may not otherwise be available from a cost perspective can be rapidly deployed and easily scaled. Processes, applications and services can be available on demand, regard-less of the user location or device. The cloud provider is responsible for the environment, so organizations can make use of resources for short periods of time without having to maintain the environment when it is not being used. While cloud computing models are attractive because of their flexibility and cost effectiveness, certain challenges must be addressed in order to provide a viable option to traditional data services. First and foremost is the issue of security. The externalized aspect of outsourcing can make it harder to maintain data integrity and privacy, support data and service availability, demonstrate compliance, and secure highly available access to applications and information. In short, cloud computing can present an added level of risk. Organizations must therefore establish trust relationships with their cloud computing providers and understand risk in terms of how these providers implement, deploy, and manage security on their behalf. Whether delivered as part of the service or as specific components added in, your cloud provider should address the fundamentals of security and risk management through a comprehensive approach.

Cloud computing is a distributed architecture that has shared resources, software, and information is provided to computers and other devices on a scalable platform and demand. Availability of the cloud services is one of the key security issues in it. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is an attack that threats the availability of the cloud services. In this paper, effect of the DDoS attack on the cloud is investigated. Therefore, a model for attack based on the DDoS is designed, and then we simulate a cloud system on the experimental environment. Experiments show that the cloud system is vulnerable to this attack. In order to confronting this attack, several solutions are proposed in this paper. We suggest load balancing and honeypots beside the intrusion detection systems (IDS) is used to defend from the attack.

Recent years have seen a paradigm shift from PC-centric computing to cloud computing. The advent of cloud computing has led to the emergence of various cloud services and providers. Cloud service brokers (CSBs) were introduced to serve as intermediaries between cloud service providers and cloud users who wish to select an appropriate cloud service. A CSB requires intermediation technologies with service recommendation, contract management, and cloud service usage assistance (such as evaluation) capabilities. These intermediation technologies enable CSBs to increase the quality of cloud service usage. However, currently commercially available CSBs fail to satisfy user requirements. In addition, many open research problems remain in the technologies and approaches underpinning CSB intermediation technologies. This paper proposes Cloud Service—Recommendation, Contract, and Evaluation (C-RCE), which supports CSB processes, including the management and operation of each proposed process. We implement a prototype of the proposed C-RCE process in a CSB to evaluate its performance and confirm that it is superior to existing CSBs. The proposed C-RCE process may be used as a guideline and reference model for constructing, operating, and managing actual CSBs.

In the current technological era, the use of computers becomes an essential part of our life. The Internet has been become as mandatory in the human-being life. The cloud computing has the potential to transform the current static Internet into a fully integrated future Internet. It is a style of computing in which resources are provided “as a service” to users who need not have knowledge or expertise and or control over the infrastructure. The cloud computing technology has become a popular and necessary in the present decade. The cloud computing is the way of sharing resources for the use of various resources via the internet. Hence there are many cloud service providers are competing with each other in order to provide cloud services to the cloud users. In fact, the growth of cloud users has been increased tremendously from last decade to the present decade. In directives to provide right cloud service to users is aimed at almost all cloud service providers. The cloud service providers are also increasing many features of their cloud service products to attract the cloud service users. But cloud service users are facing difficulties to select the right service from a pool of cloud services. Hence it has become necessary for cloud service users to evaluate cloud services and select the best one, for this purpose a new evaluation model has been proposed in this paper based on data mining Fuzzy clustering algorithm.

Cloud computing has been attracting huge attention in recent years. More and more individuals and organizations have been moving their work into cloud environments because of its flexibility and low-cost. Due to the emergence of a variety of cloud service providers, selecting the most suitable cloud service becomes increasingly important for potential cloud users. In prior studies, the selection and comparison of cloud services usually focus on objective performance analysis based on cloud monitoring and benchmark testing without considering the viewpoints of cloud users who are indeed consuming cloud services. This causes a problem that some vital aspects which concern cloud consumers (e.g., privacy and cloud providers' reputation) are not taken into account in cloud service selection. In this paper, we propose a novel model of cloud service selection by aggregating the information from both the feedback from cloud users and objective performance analysis from a trusted third party. Based on this model, we first propose a framework which supports our cloud service selection approach. Then after classifying subjective assessment and objective assessment, we present a novel cloud service selection approach to aggregate all subjective assessments and objective assessments through a fuzzy simple additive weighting system. In addition, to reduce the bias caused by unreasonable feedback from unprofessional or malicious cloud users, a method is proposed for filtering the feedback from such users. After processing, the aggregated result can quantitatively reflect the overall quality of a cloud service. Finally, a case study is presented to illustrate the advantages of our approach.

Cloud computing provides the ability to utilize scalable, distributed computing environments via the Internet. Over the years, cloud computing has grown from being a promising business concept to a fast growing sector in IT organizations. It has emerged as a promising hosting platform that allows an intelligent usage of a collection of applications, information and infrastructure comprised of pools of computer, network and storage resources. However, enterprise customers are still reluctant to deploy their business in the cloud. Security is one of the key factor which hampers growth of cloud computing. Some of the fundamental security challenges are data storage security, data transmission security, application security and security related to third-part resources. This paper focuses on security issues arising from the usage of cloud services.

Cloud computing and big data: Technologies and applications

The cloud provider plays a major role especially providing resources such as computing power for the cloud subscriber to deploy their applications on multiple platforms anywhere; anytime. Hence the cloud users still having problem for resource management in receiving the guaranteed computing resources on time. This will impact the service time and the service level agreements for various users in multiple applications. Therefore there is a need for a new resolution to resolve this problem. This survey paper conducts a study in resource allocation and monitoring in the cloud computing environment. We describe cloud computing and its properties, research issues in resource management mainly in resource allocation and monitoring and finally solutions approach for resource allocation and monitoring. It is believed that this paper would benefit both cloud users and researchers for further knowledge on resource management in cloud computing. On the other hand, the resources on the cloud are pooled in order to serve multiple subscribers. The provider use multi-tenancy model where the resources (physical and virtual) are reassigned dynamically based on the tenant requirement (5). The assigning of the resources will be based on the lease and SLA agreement, whereby different clients will need more or less amount of virtual resources. Subsequently, the growth of demands for cloud services is bringing more challenge for the provider to provide the resources to the client subscriber. Therefore, in this paper we provide a review on cloud computing which focus on resource management: allocation and monitoring. Our methodologies for this review are as follows:  We provide a cloud computing taxonomy covers the cloud definitions, characteristics and deployment models.  We then analyze the literatures and discuss about resource management, the process and the elements.  We then concentrate literatures on resource allocation and monitoring. We derived the problems, challenge and the approach solution for resource allocation and monitoring in the cloud. This paper organizes as follows: Section II introduces an overview of Cloud Computing, Section III discuss about resource management and its processes, Section IV discuss about related work with resource management in the cloud, section, Section V describes about approach solution to resource allocation and monitoring and, finally Section VI concludes the paper.

Cloud computing has been instrumental in transforming the way we store, access and process data. With mobility being the primary objective of the current market, cloud computing offers exactly that. Cloud offers convenient access to a shared pool of computing resources that can be configured and deployed with minimal effort which is used to deliver computing services over the internet. Exercising these advantages come with a plethora of security risks that need to be addressed. The security issues in cloud are complex due to the nature of implementation and regulations that govern them. In this article, we examine existing research on cloud risk and the various frameworks to manage risk. The objective is to map the risk with the audit control and technology that will help in mitigating the risk. We analysed the various cloud security solutions and came up with a list that best help in the effective management of the cloud risk and security issues.

This position paper summarizes the development and the present status of Department of Defense (DoD) and other government policies and guidances regarding cloud computing services. Due to the heterogeneous and growing biomedical big datasets, cloud computing services offer an opportunity to mitigate the associated storage and analysis requirements. Having on-demand network access to a shared pool of flexible computing resources creates a consolidated system that should reduce potential duplications of effort in military biomedical research. Interactive, online literature searches were performed with Google, at the Defense Technical Information Center, and at two National Institutes of Health research portfolio information sites. References cited within some of the collected documents also served as literature resources. We gathered, selected, and reviewed DoD and other government cloud computing policies and guidances published from 2009 to 2017. These policies were intended to consolidate computer resources within the government and reduce costs by decreasing the number of federal data centers and by migrating electronic data to cloud systems. Initial White House Office of Management and Budget information technology guidelines were developed for cloud usage, followed by policies and other documents from the DoD, the Defense Health Agency, and the Armed Services. Security standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Government Services Administration, the DoD, and the Army were also developed. Government Services Administration and DoD Inspectors General monitored cloud usage by the DoD. A 2016 Government Accountability Office report characterized cloud computing as being economical, flexible and fast. A congressionally mandated independent study reported that the DoD was active in offering a wide selection of commercial cloud services in addition to its milCloud system. Our findings from the Department of Health and Human Services indicated that the security infrastructure in cloud services may be more compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 regulations than traditional methods. To gauge the DoD's adoption of cloud technologies proposed metrics included cost factors, ease of use, automation, availability, accessibility, security, and policy compliance. Since 2009, plans and policies were developed for the use of cloud technology to help consolidate and reduce the number of data centers which were expected to reduce costs, improve environmental factors, enhance information technology security, and maintain mission support for service members. Cloud technologies were also expected to improve employee efficiency and productivity. Federal cloud computing policies within the last decade also offered increased opportunities to advance military healthcare. It was assumed that these opportunities would benefit consumers of healthcare and health science data by allowing more access to centralized cloud computer facilities to store, analyze, search and share relevant data, to enhance standardization, and to reduce potential duplications of effort. We recommend that cloud computing be considered by DoD biomedical researchers for increasing connectivity, presumably by facilitating communications and data sharing, among the various intra- and extramural laboratories. We also recommend that policies and other guidances be updated to include developing additional metrics that will help stakeholders evaluate the above mentioned assumptions and expectations.

Cloud computing is a technological marvel that transcends conventional boundaries by utilizing an Internet-based network of remote servers to store, manage, and process data and many other services. It represents a contemporary paradigm for delivering information technology services. Today, cloud computing services have become indispensable for both individuals and corporations. However, adopting cloud services presents fresh challenges in terms of service quality, resource optimization, data integration, cost governance, and operational security. The security of cloud services is of supreme importance, given the open and distributed nature of the environment, making it susceptible to various cyberattacks, such as Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed DoS (DDoS) attacks, among others. Cyberattacks can have severe repercussions on the availability of cloud services, potentially causing complete DoS. In numerous instances, the detection of attacks is delayed, pushing cloud platforms to a breaking point. Emphasizing the importance of proactive measures, it becomes crucial to identify and alert about any suspicious access long before the latter reaches a critical stage, mitigating the risks and preventing potential service disruptions. This study introduces a preventive approach that utilizes artificial intelligence techniques to improve the security of cloud services. The proposed method aims to detect and flag potential attack behaviors well in advance before they affect service quality. To achieve this, the particular method involves periodic identification and measurement of critical information on service access and resource utilization. This can be accomplished by analyzing cloud server logs or integrating dedicated sniffing software to capture and store technical traffic details. Subsequently, the collected data are processed by analyzing traffic properties to proactively identify and report any indications of cyberattacks.