Survey of Security Issues in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become one of the hottest topics in the IT world today. Its model of computing as a resource has changed the landscape of computing as we know it, and its promises of increased flexibility, greater reliability, massive scalability, and decreased costs have enchanted businesses and individuals alike. Cloud computing, as defined by NIST, is a model for enabling always-on, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., storage, applications, services, etc.) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction [1]. It is a new model of providing computing resources that utilizes existing technologies. At the core of cloud computing is a datacenter that uses virtualization to isolate instances of applications or services being hosted on the “cloud”. The datacenter provides cloud users the ability to rent computing resources at a rate dependent on the datacenter services being requested by the cloud user. Refer to the NIST definition of cloud computing, [1], for the core tenets of cloud computing. In this paper, I refer to the organization providing the datacenter and related management services as the cloud provider. I refer to the organization using the cloud to host applications as the cloud service provider (CSP). Lastly, I refer to the individuals and/or organizations using the cloud services as the cloud consumers or cloud users. NIST defines three main service models for cloud computing: