Cloud Security and Privacy Issues - Research Paper Example

?CLOUD SECURITY AND PRIVACY ISSUES Cloud Security and Privacy Issues: Research Proposal Affiliation Introduction The evolution of modern tools and technologies has modernized the ways organizations carry out their business activities. These innovative technological elements have offered numerous advantages, opportunities and potential automation of business and corporate functions. Though, the idea of remote working, storage, processing and communication is not new. In each era numerous efforts have been carried out. These developments are performed in various areas however in this age we can acutely see this idea as real implementation. In this scenario, cloud computing environment is the future of the computing industry in true means (IBM, 2012; Kourik, 2011; Pokharel & Park, 2009). Cloud computing can be defined as a responsive, scalable and proficient environment for IT applications. In my research I will discuss and assess cloud based infrastructure. Especially I will document many features that can result in better assistance in regulating a safe environment. One does not have to be afraid of how things are being managed behind the cloud, because the cloud is responsible for being extremely accessible and open to the requirements of the application (IBM, 2012; Kourik, 2011; Pokharel & Park, 2009). This research is aimed at presenting a detailed analysis of cloud computing, its security issues and other aspects. In this scenario, I will present a comprehensive assessment of some of the main security issues and aspects of cloud computing structure which are still hindering in the successful application of this technology based arrangement. In this research I will attempt to outline a number aspects that can create serious issues regarding this technology acceptance because security issues is one of the main aspects that an organization determines seriously before implementing a new technology based arrangement. Literature Review These days the use of cloud computing has become an attractive trend. Many organizations at the present use clouds to manage their business operations. However, there are several security issues attached with cloud computing. The purpose of this literature review is to outline some of the important security aspects which are discussed in other researches. According to (Babar & Chauhan, 2011; Meng, Wang, Hu, & Li, 2011), cloud computing is an up-and-coming paradigm, which guarantees to make the utility computing model broadly implemented by using Virtualization technologies. Additionally, an increasing number of business organizations have begun offering and utilizing cloud-enabled architectures and services. On the other hand, the progression of cloud computing creates a number of new challenges to existing techniques and approaches to build up and change software intensive systems (Babar & Chauhan, 2011; Meng, Wang, Hu, & Li, 2011). In this scenario, (Hamlen, Kantarcioglu, Khan, & Thuraisingham, 2010) outline a number of security issues in a cloud computing environment. These problems and issues comprise physical security, data security, middleware safety, application security and network security. However, the key goal is to effectively store and administer data that is not managed by the owner of the data. In addition, the previous researches have focused on specific areas and aspects of cloud computing. Especially, those researches have assessed such issues in a bottom-up approach to security where we are operating on little issues in the cloud computing arrangement that we hope will resolve the bigger issues and complexities of cloud security (Hamlen, Kantarcioglu, Khan, & Thuraisingham, 2010). Initially, they have shown that “how can we protect data, information and documents that can be published by a 3rd party organization. After that, they have shown that how to protect co-processors and how they can be utilized to improve security. This research lastly discussed how XACML can be established in the Hadoop atmosphere and in protected federated query processing through SPARQL, Hadoop and MapReduce. Moreover, there are many other security issues comprising security areas and features of Virtualization. Additionally, it is assumed that because of the issues and complexity of the cloud, it will be hard to attain an end-to-end security. Though, the problems this research outlined and solution proposed are able to make sure additional protected operations yet a number of parts of the cloud fail. For a lot of systems and applications, we don't simply require data and information assurance however as well attainment of objectives. Hence, even if a rival has come into the system, the intention is to prevent the challenger so that the corporation has time to perform the desired tasks (Hamlen, Kantarcioglu, Khan, & Thuraisingham, 2010). Moreover, (Chow, et al., 2009) state that cloud computing is probable to have the similar impact on software that founders have had on the hardware manufacturing. They move on to advocate that technology developers would be intelligent to plan and develop their next and advanced generation of systems to be established into cloud computing. Seeing that many of the forecasts can be clouded hype, it is assessed that the recent IT procurement model presented by cloud computing is here to stay. In addition, the acceptance of cloud computing has turned out to be common and deep thus a number of forecasts will rely mainly on overcoming doubts of the cloud (Chow, et al., 2009). In addition, cloud computing concerns mainly stem from the apparent loss of control over corporate important and sensitive data. In this scenario, existing control procedures do not sufficiently tackle cloud computing of 3rd party data storage as well as processing requirements. Thus, researches proposed to expand control procedures from the enterprise into the cloud by making use of the trustable computing as well as functional cryptographic methods. These events should ease a great deal of today’s issues of cloud computing, as well as, it is assessed that they have the potential to offer provable business intelligence profitable to cloud contribution. This research communicates to potential problems and abuses coming out of a superior dependence on cloud computing, as well as how to maintain safety in spite of simpler attacks (Chow, et al., 2009). According to (Gregg, 2010), a lot of businesses are presently moving to cloud computing. In case of the cloud computing, some of the possible security and privacy issues can comprise Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, Side Channel attacks, Authentication attacks, Man-in-the-middle cryptographic attacks and numerous other attacks can possibly change the corporate working and operations. These attacks are becoming more and more drastic (Gregg, 2010). Research Question This research is going to investigate a number of security issues and aspects of cloud computing. This research will attempt to investigate possible issues of security. In this scenario, I will analyze the fundamental security issues in the application, working and management of cloud computing arrangement. This research will attempt to answer the following questions: What are the possible bottlenecks in the successful application of the Cloud Computing architecture? What are the possible corporate implementation issues in a Cloud Computing Environment? How we can improve the Cloud Computing environment? Research Methodology This research will be a qualitative research that will assess and analyze the possible areas of the cloud computing arrangement. The research will outline cloud computing related security and privacy issues and concerns. This research will investigate and outline a number of issues and concerns regarding security which causes numerous other issues and aspects and discourage the use of cloud computing. Cloud computing is one of most-hottest technology these days that is offering extensive technology and operational support for the businesses. This research will summarize the points of other researchers. Annotated Bibliography Babar, M. A., & Chauhan, M. A. (2011). A tale of migration to cloud computing for sharing experiences and observations. SECLOUD '11 Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Software Engineering for Cloud Computing (pp. 50-56). New York: ACM. In this paper (Babar & Chauhan, 2011) discuss their experiences and observations which they gained while migrating an Open Source Software (OSS), Hackystat, to cloud computing environment. According to this research the implementation of Hackystat's architecture earlier and after migration and design decisions can be helpful in adapting and adjusting architecture of a service-based system for cloud computing. In addition, the experiences discussed in this paper can promote the classification of some research questions for increasing software engineering support for building and improving cloud-enabled systems. Chow, R., Golle, P., Jakobsson, M., Shi, E., Staddon, J., Masuoka, R., et al. (2009). Controlling Data in the Cloud: Outsourcing Computation without Outsourcing Control. CCSW '09 Proceedings of the 2009 ACM workshop on Cloud computing security (pp. 85-90). ACM. In this paper (Chow, et al., 2009) discuss their ideas regarding cloud computing. They believe that cloud computing is one of today's most attractive technology areas, due to its cost-efficiency and flexibility. They also say there are considerable, unrelenting concerns about cloud computing that are impeding momentum and will eventually compromise the vision of cloud computing as a new IT procurement model. In their research, they differentiate the issues and problems and how these issues affect the adoption of the cloud computing. In this research, they also explain how the mixture of existing research thrusts has the potential to alleviate many of the concerns impeding adoption. They also argue that with continual research developments in trusted computing and computation-supporting encryption, life in the cloud can be advantageous from a business intelligence standpoint over the isolated alternative that is more common today. Gregg, M. (2010). 10 Security Concerns for Cloud Computing. Retrieved February 28, 2012, from http://viewer.media.bitpipe.com/1078177630_947/1268847180_5/WP_VI_10SecurityConcernsCloudComputing.pdf This is a white paper in which Gregg discuss top ten security concerns for cloud computing. The purpose of this white paper is to determine the security issues and their impact on cloud computing. In this paper Gregg discusses how these security concerns occur in cloud computing and how it discourages the use of this innovative technology. Hamlen, K., Kantarcioglu, M., Khan, L., & Thuraisingham, B. (2010). Security Issues for Cloud Computing. International Journal of Information Security and Privacy, Volume 4 Issue 2, pp. 39-51. As the name of the paper demonstrates that in this paper (Hamlen, Kantarcioglu, Khan, & Thuraisingham, 2010) outline some of major security issues for cloud computing and present a layered framework for secure clouds and then focus on two of the layers, i.e., the storage layer and the data layer. In addition, they discuss a scheme for secure third party publications of documents in a cloud. They also talk about secure federated query processing with map Reduce and Hadoop, and discuss the use of secure co-processors for cloud computing. In this paper, authors also talk about XACML implementation for Hadoop. According to their research, the development of trusted applications from untrusted components will be a major aspect of secure cloud computing. IBM. (2012). Cloud Computing With Amazon Web Services, Part 1: Introduction - When It's Smarter to Rent Than to Buy. Retrieved February 20, 2012, from http://www.techrepublic.com/whitepapers/cloud-computing-with-amazon-web-services-part-1-introduction-when-its-smarter-to-rent-than-to-buy/383521 This resource was used to give an overview of the cloud computing. This article is written by Prabhakar Chaganti, who is CTO of the CTO of Ylastic. This article is published by IBM. In this article, Prabhakar Chaganti discusses some basic concepts and looks at some of the activities performed by boto, an open source Python library for interacting with SDB. This is a complete series with the title of "Cloud computing with Amazon Web Services" series, which teaces about cloud computing using Amazon Web Services. This article shows how these services provide a compelling alternative for architecting and building scalable, reliable applications. In this scnario, this first article explains the features of the building blocks of this virtual infrastructure. This article allows us to understand that how we can use Amazon Web Services to build Web-scale systems. Kourik, J. L. (2011). For small and medium size enterprises (SME) deliberating cloud computing: a proposed approach. ECC'11 Proceedings of the 5th European conference on European computing conference (pp. 216-221). World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society (WSEAS) Stevens Point, Wisconsin, USA. In this paper Kourik discusses how cloud computing can be used by the small and medium size organizations and what benefits do they achive therough the implementation of this modern technology. First of all, author gives an overiew of the cloud computing and then discusses potential benefits of cloud computing include reducing IT capital expenditure, providing rapid dynamic scaling of resources on a metered basis, as well as transparency related to platforms, storage, transmission and processing of data. However, author also says that these benefits come with many potential problems. According to this research, there is an urgent need to investigate and understand security assurance in cloud computing. Small to medium enterprises (SMEs) may be unable to dedicate specialized staff and other resources to this end. In this paper author argues that emerging taxonomies, frameworks and guidelines, collectively referred to as instruments, can facilitate SME enquiry into cloud computing. However, these instruments are rarely referenced in the academic literature, drawing attention to a continuing gap between industry and academia. This paper also discusses potential benefits and drawbacks in cloud computing are presented. Meng, F., Wang, T., Hu, N., & Li, H. (2011). Research of the application of cloud computing theory in emergent material support. ICCC '11 Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Innovative Computing and Cloud Computing (pp. 50-53). New York: ACM. As name suggests, in this paper Meng et., al. focues on the importance of the application of cloud computing theory in emergent material support. According to their viewpoint, the cloud computing theory playing a significant role in business increasingly, the cloud computing theory is applied in many trades wider and deeper. They start their discussion by analyzing the basic theory and application of the cloud computing, and then combine characteristics of the emergent material support, and apply the cloud computing theory the emergent material support, put forward "cloud guarantee" imagination. In this research they also analyze and design the structure of the emergent material support system based on the cloud computing theory, to aim at raising emergent material support efficiently. Basically, their research has great significance for raising emergent material support ability, and improving the safety of the lives and property. Pokharel, M., & Park, J. S. (2009). Cloud computing: future solution for e-governance. ICEGOV '09 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Theory and practice of electronic governance (pp. 409-410). ACM New York, USA. In this paper, Pokharel and Park discuss the importance of the cloud computing for e-governance. They believe cloud computing is very useful for businesses. They categorize computing into three main entities i.e. Software, Hardware and Network. The collective nature of all these entities is known as the Cloud. In this research they analyse cloud computing and examines its application in the context of e-government. According to their research existing e-government practices face many challenges, from development to implementation. Thus, they propose cloud computing as an ideal solution to these challenges including maintaining Green ICT. Read More