Securing Cloud Environment

Cloud Computing has rapidly emerged as a new computing paradigm that arrays massive numbers of computers in centralized and distributed data centers to deliver web-based applications, application platforms, and services via a utility model. Cloud computing technologies include grid computing, utility computing and virtualization. It is very much essential to make computations of the virtual machines confidential and secured. Challenges that cloud computing currently face, when deployed on a large enterprise scale, include self-healing, multi-tenancy, service-orientation, virtualization, scalability and data management. Undoubtedly, any model which involves data assets residing on equipment not within users’ immediate control needs to address security and privacy. Securing the cloud environment encompasses many different things, including standard enterprise security policies on access control, activity monitoring, patch management, etc. This paper focuses on the approaches to secure the cloud environment.