Security Threats - Main Hindrance to the Wide Acceptance of Cloud Computing Services

Cloud computing has become new trend, which many enterprises wants to incorporates in their working. Since it relies on sharing of computing resources rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications. Cloud computing offers reduced capital expenditure, operational risks, complexity and maintenance, and increased scalability while providing services at different abstraction levels, namely Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)[3] It is used in consumer-oriented applications such as financial portfolios delivering personalized information, or power immersive computer games. The cloud computing however, has not gained wide acceptance. For which the main reason is security issue. Cloud computing is surrounded by many security issues like securing data, data integrity and examining the utilization of data in cloud by the cloud computing vendors This paper is study of various security threats posed to the data stored in cloud and also threats concerned to both user and vendors in cloud computing. This is a literature survey of various key security threats associated with cloud computing. It also includes a critical analysis of various research papers on same grounds. At the same time it discusses various security models and tools proposed in those papers in order to protect data confidentiality and provide security to the data in cloud computing.