COMPUTER CLOUD SECURITY SYSTEM. A RESEARCH PROJECT MATERIAL ON COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION
ABSTRACT
Cloud Computing is a flexible, cost-effective, and proven delivery platform for providing business or consumer IT services over the Internet. However, cloud Computing presents an added level of risk because essential services are often outsourced to a third party, which makes it harder to maintain data security and privacy, support data and service availability, and demonstrate compliance. Cloud Computing leverages many technologies (SOA, virtualization, Web 2.0); it also inherits their security issues, which we discuss here, identifying the main vulnerabilities in this kind of systems and the most important threats found in the literature related to Cloud Computing and its environment as well as to identify and relate vulnerabilities and threats with possible solutions.
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 Introduction
The importance of Cloud Computing is increasing and it is receiving a growing attention in the scientific and industrial communities. A study by Gartner [2011] considered Cloud Computing as the first among the top 10 most important technologies and with a better prospect in successive years by companies and organizations.
Cloud Computing enables ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
Cloud Computing appears as a computational paradigm as well as a distribution architecture and its main objective is to provide secure, quick, convenient data storage and net computing service, with all computing resources visualized as services and delivered over the Internet [Zhao G, Liu J, Tang Y:2011, Zhang S, Zhang S:2012:p342]. The cloud enhances collaboration, agility, scalability, availability, ability to adapt to fluctuations according to demand, accelerate development work, and provides potential for cost reduction through optimized and efficient computing [Marinos A, Briscoe G:2011:p53].
Cloud Computing combines a number of computing concepts and technologies such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web 2.0, virtualization and other technologies with reliance on the Internet, providing common business applications online through web browsers to satisfy the computing needs of users, while their software and data are stored on the servers [Marinos A, Briscoe G:2009:p93]. In some respects, Cloud Computing represents the maturing of these technologies and is a marketing term to represent that maturity and the services they provide [Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure:2010].