Survey on data remanence in Cloud Computing environment

The Cloud Computing is a developing IT concept that faces some issues, which are slowing down its evolution and adoption by users across the world. The lack of security has been the main concern. Organizations and entities need to ensure, inter alia, the integrity and confidentiality of their outsourced sensible data within a cloud provider server. Solutions have been examined in order to strengthen security models (strong authentication, encryption and fragmentation before storing, access control policies…). More particularly, data remanence is undoubtedly a major threat. How could we be sure that data are, when is requested, truly and appropriately deleted from remote servers? In this paper, we aim to produce a survey about this interesting subject and to address the problem of residual data in a cloud-computing environment, which is characterized by the use of virtual machines instantiated in remote servers owned by a third party.