Integration of the Internet of Things and Cloud: Security Challenges and Solutions – A Review

Integration Of The Internet Of Things And Cloud: Security Challenges And Solutions: A Review

The Internet of Things (IoT) sensors purposefully interact with other connected entities in the real world to acquire different operational parameters and share the data to other devices and systems over the Internet or any other communication network without human intervention (Mercado Herrera et al., 2023). The advancement in hardware and wireless communication technologies promotes the usage of IoT devices across various domains. In 2025, the number of IoT devices in the world will be approximately 75.44 billion (Alam, 2018). Artificial intelligence (AI) makes the IoT networks intelligent and increases the scope of IoT connectivity and vast data streams (Khanam et al., 2022). The rapid growth of IoT sensors and the corresponding generation of a large volume of data are obviously in need of huge resources for storage and processing (Qabil et al., 2019). There are several popular approaches like on-premises private clouds and edge device clouds for data capture, storage, analysis, and visualization. But with the public cloud environment (off-premises, on-demand, and online) emerging as the most optimized and affordable option for large-scale data storage and processing, IoT data gets transmitted over the Internet to faraway cloud centers. There are automated tools for data storage, analysis, management, observability, and maintenance in the public cloud environment.

With its rapid and flexible resource provisioning at low cost (Truong & Dustdar, 2015) cloud can fulfill the major deficiencies of IoT, namely limited storage, low computing power, and deficient processing capabilities (Atlam et al., 2017; Botta et al., 2016). Cloud can provide the required scalability to an application while allowing the provisioning of resources to instantly scale up or down according to the demands of the applications (Righi et al., 2020). Machine learning tools and platforms that are available in public cloud make descriptive, predictive, prescriptive, and adaptive analytics easier (Adi et al., 2020). Rough set theory can efficiently select optimized cloud services for different tasks, namely inductive reasoning, automatic classification, pattern recognition, learning algorithms, and data reduction (Tiwari & Garg, 2022). Cloud provides monitoring and management of remote IoT sensors (Lineswala & Swali, 2020) in a centralized manner along with a robust Identity Access Management (IAM). Also, it offers services to store the security credentials of IoT devices.

Already IoT has revolutionized the way that different industries like healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture, oil and energy, transportation, and logistics are enhancing their processes by using IoT technology. In addition, cloud computing assists the IoT systems by providing adequate resources and ensures business continuity. Ultimately, the integration of IoT and cloud has led to the development of various useful applications like smart grid automation, smart energy, smart city, transportation and logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture (Alam, 2021; Dahiya et al., 2022; Guida et al., 2021; Haghnegahdar et al., 2022; Khattab et al., 2016; Xu et al., 2023).

In short, the integration of IoT and cloud provides the following benefits:

• 1.

  The IoT devices can access hardware and software services from cloud from any remote location.

• 2.

  Cloud enables centralized device registration, configuration, and management.

• 3.

  The scalability of cloud-based IoT applications is very high.

• 4.

  Cloud provides secure storage facility and life cycle management for IoT data.

• 5.

  Cloud can serve as a platform for developing complex applications with better use of online data.

• 6.

  Cloud facilitates large scale data analysis using machine learning algorithms.

• 7.

  Could ensures regular updates of software, platforms, and firmware which protect the IoT applications against known vulnerabilities.

• 8.

  Cloud provides scalable, reliable, and adaptable services and solutions which certainly lead to enhanced performance of the real-life applications.