Security and Privacy in Cloud Computing: A Survey

Cloud computing can be defined as management and provision of different resources, such as, software, applications and information as services over the cloud (internet) on demand. Cloud computing is based on the assumption that the information can be quickly and easily accessed via the net. With its ability to provide dynamically scalable access for users, and the ability to share resources over the Internet, cloud computing has recently emerged as a promising hosting platform that performs an intelligent usage of a collection of services, applications, information and infrastructure comprised of pools of computers, networks, information and storage resources. Cloud computing is a multi-tenant resource sharing platform, which allows different service providers to deliver software as services in an economical way. Cloud computing is the latest technology revolution in terms of usage and management of IT resources and services driven largely by marketing and service offerings from the largest IT vendors including Google [26], IBM [19], Microsoft, and HP along with Amazon [17, 20, 24] and VMWare. However along with these advantages, storing a large amount of data including critical information on the cloud motivates highly skilled hackers, thus creating a need for the security is considered as one of the top issues while considering Cloud Computing. In this paper, we first explain the security model of cloud computing, and then analyze the feasibility, threats, and security in cloud computing in terms of extensive existing methods to control them along with their pros and cons. After that, the related open research problems and challenges are explored to promote the development of cloud computing.