An Analysis of the Cloud Computing Security Problem
This addresses security concerns for organizations adopting cloud computing, but it is incremental as it provides analysis without new methods or data.
The paper analyzes the security challenges in cloud computing, identifying key problem dimensions such as architecture, multi-tenancy, and service models, and derives specifications for security solutions.
Cloud computing is a new computational paradigm that offers an innovative business model for organizations to adopt IT without upfront investment. Despite the potential gains achieved from the cloud computing, the model security is still questionable which impacts the cloud model adoption. The security problem becomes more complicated under the cloud model as new dimensions have entered into the problem scope related to the model architecture, multi-tenancy, elasticity, and layers dependency stack. In this paper we introduce a detailed analysis of the cloud security problem. We investigated the problem from the cloud architecture perspective, the cloud offered characteristics perspective, the cloud stakeholders' perspective, and the cloud service delivery models perspective. Based on this analysis we derive a detailed specification of the cloud security problem and key features that should be covered by any proposed security solution.