Cloud computing refers to the basic setup for an emerging model of service delivery, that has the advantage of decreasing the cost by sharing computing, infrastructure including storage resources. This can be combined with on-demand delivery mechanism relying on a pay-per-use model. Cloud computing offers an added level of risk because of essential services provided by it to a third party, which makes it difficult to maintain data privacy and security. Security in cloud computing is a critical aspect, which has various issues and challenges related to it. Cloud service providers/ brokers and the cloud service users should make aware of safety cloud. That is the cloud is safe enough from all kinds of the threats, so that the users do not face any problem like; loss of data or data theft. There is a possibility that, a malicious user can enters the cloud by imitating an authentic user, thus corrupt the entire cloud. It can affect many users who are sharing these types of clouds. This chapter mentions the list of parameters that disturb the security of the cloud. This also explores the cloud security issues and challenges faced by cloud service provider/brokers and cloud service users like; data, privacy, and infected application. Finally, it discusses the countermeasure for handling these issues and its challenges.
TopIntroduction
Albeit there is no established definition for cloud computing, a definition that is adopted in a conventional manner which is provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) of United States as:
Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. (Mell & Grance, 2009)
Cloud computing is a prototype for conducive and on-demand networking platform to a shared group of configurable computing resources that can be expeditiously coupled and unconstrained with minimal management efforts. Cloud computing performs as a computational paradigm with distribution architecture. The main objectives of cloud computing concept are to provide quick, convenient, secure data storage and clear computing service, with all available computing resources treated as services and delivered over the Internet (Zhao et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2010). The cloud augments fraternization, dexterity; extensibility, opportunity, competency to acclimate to fluctuations based on demand, accelerates the development works as per the users requirements, and provides the potential for cost reduction by optimized, effective and efficient computing in the cloud. The cloud computing concept is to make administer scalable with low-cost on-demand computing resources and it provides good quality of service levels. This type of computing is basically used to shares the distributed large scale resources which is cost effective and location independent. Resources available in the cloud can be used by the different client and designed and developed by the vendors such as Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, Zoho, Rackspace, etc. It shares necessary software and various on-demand tools for different IT Industries to achieve enormous benefits of cloud computing. The most vital point for the customers/ client is that, the customers/ clients don’t need to buy any resource from a third-party vendor. They can use the resource available in the cloud and pay for it as a service. Therefore, it helps a lot to the customers for saving the time and money. Clouds are not only for Multinational large companies but also being used by small and medium organisations (Lord CrusAd3r, n.d.). Although there are various advantages to adopting cloud computing concept, there are also some consequential obstacles to adopt this concept in the organisation.