An analysis of the cloud computing security problem

TLDR

Cloud computing offers a new business model for organizations to adopt IT without upfront investment, yet its security remains uncertain due to added dimensions such as architecture, multi‑tenancy, elasticity, and layered dependencies. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the cloud security problem. The authors examined the problem from four perspectives: cloud architecture, offered characteristics, stakeholders, and service delivery models. The analysis yields a comprehensive specification of the cloud security problem and identifies key features that any security solution must address.

Abstract

Cloud computing is a new computational paradigm that offers an innovative business model for organizations to adopt IT without upfront investment. Despite the potential gains achieved from the cloud computing, the model security is still questionable which impacts the cloud model adoption. The security problem becomes more complicated under the cloud model as new dimensions have entered into the problem scope related to the model architecture, multi-tenancy, elasticity, and layers dependency stack. In this paper we introduce a detailed analysis of the cloud security problem. We investigated the problem from the cloud architecture perspective, the cloud offered characteristics perspective, the cloud stakeholders’ perspective, and the cloud service delivery models perspective. Based on this analysis we derive a detailed specification of the cloud security problem and key features that should be covered by any proposed security solution.