Enhancement of Single to Inter-clouds in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing promises to significantly change the way we use computers and access and store our personal and business information. With these new computing and communications paradigms arise new data security challenges. Existing data protection mechanisms such as encryption have failed in preventing data theft attacks, especially those perpetrated by an insider to the cloud provider. The use of cloud computing has increased rapidly in many organizations. Cloud computing provides many benefits in terms of low cost and accessibility of data. Ensuring the security of cloud computing is a major factor in the cloud computing environment, as users often store sensitive information with cloud storage providers but these providers may be untrusted. Dealing with “single cloud” providers is predicted to become less popular with customers due to risks of service availability failure and the possibility of malicious insiders in the single cloud. A movement towards “multi-clouds”, or in other words, “inter clouds” or “cloud-of-clouds” has emerged recently. This paper surveys recent research related to single and intercloud security and addresses possible solutions. It is found that the research into the use of inter-cloud providers to maintain security has received less attention from the research community than has the use of single clouds. This work aims to promote the use of inter-clouds due to its ability to reduce security risks that affect the cloud computing user. KeywordsPrivate clouds, Public clouds, Cloud service, IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, single cloud, inter-clouds, cloud storage, data integrity, data intrusion, service availability.