Security Policy Enforcement in Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud computing is a computing environment consisting of different facilitating components like hardware, software, firmware, networking, and services. Internet or a private network provides the required backbone to deliver the cloud services. The benefits of cloud computing like “ondemand, customized resource availability and performance management” are overpowered by the associated security risks to the cloud system, particularly to the cloud users or clients. Existing traditional IT and enterprise security are not adequate to address the cloud security issues. In order to deploy different cloud applications, it is understood that security concerns of cloud computing are to be effectively addressed. Cloud security is such an area which deals with the concerns and vulnerabilities of cloud computing for ensuring safer computing environment. This paper explores the challenges and issues of security concerns of cloud computing through different standard and novel solutions. This paper proposes architecture for incorporating different security schemes, techniques and protocols for cloud computing, particularly in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) systems. The proposed architecture is generic in nature, not dependent on the type of cloud deployment, application agnostic and is not coupled with the underlying backbone. This would facilitate to manage the cloud system more effectively and provide the administrator to include the specific solution to counter the threat.