An Analysis of the Cloud Computing Security Problem

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of security challenges in cloud computing, examining architectural, stakeholder, and service model perspectives to define key security features needed for solutions.

Contribution

It offers a detailed analysis of cloud security issues from multiple perspectives, outlining essential features for effective security solutions.

Findings

Identified security challenges across cloud architecture and models

Defined key security features necessary for cloud solutions

Provided a comprehensive specification of cloud security problems

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.