Security Aspects in Cloud Computing

Clients

End users interact with the clients to access services provided by the cloud. Clients generally fall into various categories as thin client, thick client and mobile client.

Datacenter

In order to subscribe different applications, an end user connects to the datacenter which is a collection of servers hosting different applications.

Distributed Servers

Distributed servers are present throughout the Internet to host different applications.

Based on the domain or environment in which clouds are used, clouds can be divided into 3 categories as (Velte A. T.,Velte T.J. & Elsenpeter R., 2010) (See Figure 2):

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  Public Cloud: It is available to the general public users in a pay-as-you-go manner irrespective of their origin or affiliation.

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  Private Cloud: Its usage is restricted to members, employees, and trusted partners of the organization.

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  Hybrid Cloud: It is combination of both the private and public clouds and enables the use of private and public Cloud in a seamless manner.

Figure 2.

Cloud computing deployment and deliver models

The services of cloud computing are categorized as (Velte A. T.,Velte T.J. & Elsenpeter R., 2010):

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  Software as a Service (SaaS): In SaaS, the client uses different software applications from different servers through the Internet and pays for the time he uses the software.

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  Platform as a Service (PaaS): PaaS provides all the resources that are required for building applications and services completely from the Internet, without downloading or installing software.

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  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): IaaS provides necessary infrastructure to develop and deploy applications. It is also known as Hardware as a Service (HaaS). It offers the hardware as a service to an organization so that it can put anything into the hardware according to its will.

Though cloud computing is the most promising technology, it faces many security challenges. The security concern arises because user’s data and applications are present outside the administrative control in a shared environment and accessed by various other users. This shared and on-demand nature of cloud computing introduces the new security violations which limits the adoption of cloud computing. Therefore many users are reluctant in completely trusting the cloud computing environment (KPMG, 2010; Keiko H., Rosado D. G., Eduardo F. & Eduardo B.F., 2013).

The traditional security mechanisms such as identity management, authentication, and authorization are not sufficient for cloud computing in form they exist presently. The security risks associated with the organization by adoption of cloud are quite different than the traditional IT organizations (Li W., Ping L., 2009). Cloud computing security mechanism must address the security concerns from the perspective of end users and also for the cloud service providers. The security mechanism must include different standards and procedures to provide security assurance for all cloud service delivery models i.e. Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It should also take into consideration the different deployment models of cloud computing (public, private and hybrid cloud).