Securing Data Storage By Extending Role-Based Access Control

1. Introduction

Cloud computing has begun to emerge as a hotspot in both industry and academia; It represents a new business model and computing paradigm, which enables on demand provisioning of computational and storage resources. Economic benefits consist of the main drive for cloud computing due to the fact that cloud computing offers an effective way to reduce capital expenditure and operational expenditure. The definition of cloud computing as per the literature in I. Foster (2009) is ”A large-scale distributed computing paradigm that is driven by economies of scale, in which a pool of abstracted, virtualized, dynamically scalable, managed computing power, storage, platforms, and services are delivered on demand to external customers over the Internet.”

The Cloud Security Alliance has summarized five essential characteristics (CSA, 2009) that illustrate the relation to, and differences from, traditional computing paradigm:

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  On-demand self-service: A cloud customer may unilaterally obtain computing capabilities, like the usage of various servers and network storage, as on demand, without interacting with the cloud provider;

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  Broad network access: Services are delivered across the Internet via a standard mechanism that allows customers to access the services through heterogeneous thin or thick client tools (e.g., PCs, mobile phones, and PDAs);

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  Resource pooling: The cloud provider employs a multitenant model to serve multiple customers by pooling computing resources, which are different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned or reassigned according to customer demand. Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth, and virtual machines.

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  Rapid elasticity: Capabilities may be rapidly and elastically provisioned in order to quickly scale out or rapidly released to quickly scale in. From customers’ point of view, the available capabilities should appear to be unlimited and have the ability to be purchased in any quantity at any time;

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  Measured service: The service purchased by customers can be quantified and measured. For both the provider and customers, resource usage will be monitored, controlled, metered, and reported.