A Survey: Threats and Vulnerabilities in Cloud

Aspects of Cloud Computing

The important facets or characteristics discussed in (Ali, M., U. Khan, S.U., Vasilakos, A.V. 2015) of cloud computing are as follows that offers numerous benefits to its customers are described below-

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  On-Demand Self Service: Customers can directly request and manage the services (they need) from the cloud. There is no need to interact with the cloud service providers for requesting the resources. This is accomplished by employing web services and management interfaces.

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  Ubiquitous Network Access: Customers access the services and their applications and data present on the cloud using some standard mechanisms and protocols. It provides a broad network access which ensures that the services made available to the users on the cloud should support any type of platform(for example, mobile phones, laptops, workstations, tablets etc). The services and data are available from anywhere and at anytime.

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  Resource Pooling: The resources on the cloud are manifold and can be shared among numerous and varied customers in a multi-tenant environment. Customer generally has no command or knowledge over the exact location of the resources but may specify location at higher level of abstraction (example, country, state or data center).

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  Rapid Elasticity: The resources can be rapidly and elastically provisioned according to customer’s demands. In some cases it can be automatically done, to quickly scale out and rapidly released to quickly scale in. Resources available for provisioning are unlimited and can be purchased in any quantity at any time.

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  Measured Service: The cloud environment provides the usage of various resources and services which are reported to customers and the CSP. The metering process offers the ability to automatically optimize the use of resources and also, the customers have to pay only for those resources which are used by them. It allows resources to be used in pay-as-you-use manner.

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  Multi-Tenancy: This property allows multiple customers (that may or may not belong to the same organization) to use a single resource.

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  Service Models: There are three categories of services provided by cloud computing namely- Software as a service(SAAS), infrastructure as a service(IAAS), and Platform as a service(PAAS).