Cloud computing technology is a relatively new concept of providing scalable and virtualized resources, software and hardware on demand to consumers. It presents a new technology to deliver computing resources as a service. It offers a variety of benefits like services on demand and provisioning and suffers from several weaknesses. In fact security presents a major obstacle in cloud computing adoption. In this chapter, we will deal with security problems in cloud computing systems and show how to solve these problems using a quantitative security risk assessment model named Multi-dimensional Mean Failure Cost (M2FC). In fact, we present first a deep analysis of security issues related to cloud computing environments and then propose a generic framework that analysis and evaluate cloud security problems and then propose appropriate countermeasures to solve these problems.
TopSecurity On Cloud Computing System
Cloud Computing is a new way of delivering computing resources, as a public utility. Computing services such as data storage and email handling are now instantly available, and on demand. It is an on demand service model for IT provision, often based on virtualization and distributed computing technologies. It offers many benefits like highly abstracted resources, services on demand with a ‘’pay as you go’’ billing system, immediate provisioning, shared resources (hardware, database, memory…) and programmatic management tool (Grobauer, Walloschek, & Stocker, 2011). Cloud Computing is such a type of computing environment, where business owners outsource their computing needs including application software services to a third party; and when they need to use the computing power or employees need to use the application resources like database, and emails, they access the resource via internet.
Cloud Computing can be considered a new computing paradigm as it allows the utilization of a computing infrastructure at one or more levels of abstraction, as an on-demand service made available over the Internet or other computer network. Because of the implications for greater flexibility and availability at lower cost, Cloud Computing is a subject that has been receiving a good deal of attention lately (Grobauer, Walloschek, & Stocker, 2011). It received a considerable attention from global and local IT players, national governments, and international agencies (Ben Arfa Rabai, Jouini, Ben Aissa & Mili, 2012; Jouini, Ben Arfa Rabai, Ben Aissa & Mili, 2012; Ben Arfa Rabai, Jouini, Ben Aissa & Mili, 2013). But as more and more information on individuals and companies is placed in the Cloud, concerns are beginning to grow about just how safe this environment is. The externalized aspect of outsourcing makes it harder to maintain data integrity and privacy, support data and service availability and demonstrate compliance. For example, IDC Enterprise Panel recently conducted a survey of 244 IT executives/ Chief Executive Officers (CIOs) and their line-of business (LOB) colleagues to gauge their opinions and understand their companies’ use of IT Cloud services. Security ranked first as the greatest challenge or issue of Cloud Computing by 74,6%, then we find performance and availability by 63,1% (Gens, 2009). Furthermore, hackers could take advantage of the massive computing power of Clouds to fire attacks to users who are in the same or different networks. For instance, hackers rented a server through Amazon’s EC2 service and carried out an attack to Sony's PlayStation Network (Amazon, 2011). Therefore, a good understanding of Cloud security problems and threats is necessary in order to provide more secure services to Cloud users.