CLOUD

Cloud Computing Security

Cloud Computing Security

Introduction

With the passage of time, the cloud technology is becoming increasingly more significant and receiving increased consideration in the industrial and scientific areas. The cloud technology has received the top rating amongst the ten most important technologies and those that have a better prospect by the firms and companies in the years to come. In spite of the fact that there are a number of merits gained by any company against the adoption of cloud computing, there are yet a few significant constraints allied to its adoption and usage. Security is the most eminent one amongst these constraints that brings with it, the issues related to the privacy, legal affairs, and compliance.

About Cloud Computing

Introduction

Cloud computing stands for the traditions of contracting out a significant part of an organization's technology, to a widespread setup, by a third party. Though the term cloud computing is contemporary; nevertheless, the idea is not novel. Several similar contributions have been adapted to the idea of “Application server provider” (Baun, 2011, pp. 1-9). The term “cloud” in cloud computing denotes a set of services, networks, interfaces, hardware, and storage, which are all combined to deliver the facets of computing as a service. The services delivered by the cloud technology count in the delivery of infrastructure, software, and storage over the internet, on the bases of varying demands by various users (Antonopoulos, 2010, pp. 1-8).

Various implementations of Cloud Computing

There are various implementations of the cloud technology and all of them are aimed at different corporate and organizational needs and demands, and they range from the shared public implementations to the internal private clouds.

Public Cloud

The public cloud can be accessed from a third party service provider via the internet. In a public cloud, the entire data and computations are carried out and stored on the vendor's servers.

This entails that users have an interaction with the servers of the vendor rather than their own servers

Private Cloud

The private cloud is administered and hosted in a firm internally and it is quite different from the private cloud. The private cloud exploits various positive effects of a public cloud, its elastic and service oriented nature, for instance. Nevertheless, it also offers an improved control over the sensitive organizational information, in comparison to the public cloud (Armbrust, et al. 2010, pp. 18-20).

Hybrid Cloud

The third and the last implementation type of the cloud technology is the hybrid cloud, which is a combination of the public and the private clouds. The sensitive information in a hybrid cloud is confined inside the firm while the non-sensitive information is contracted out to the external providers of the cloud technology. Also, some parts of the cloud, in case of its hybrid implementation, are hosted internally in the company and manage the significant and sensitive information. The rest of the functions are accessed through the public vendors.

Cloud Services

The most fundamental types of services provided by the cloud technology are; platform, software, and infrastructure, each as a service. These services encompass middleware, databases, storage, ...