Toward Securing Cloud-Based Data Analytics: A Discussion on Current Solutions and Open Issues

In the last few years, organizations and business professionals have realized the value of collaborative data analytics in supporting decision-making. Where several activities are performed on online data by different stakeholders, such as cleansing, aggregation, analysis, and visualization, cloud-based data analytics has become a favored choice for business professionals due to the elasticity, availability, scalability, and pay-as-you-go features offered by cloud computing. However, large amounts of data stored on the cloud are very sensitive (e.g., innovation, financial, legal, and customers' data), and so data privacy remains one of the top concerns for many reasons; mainly those relating to legal or competition issues. In this paper, we review the security and cryptographic mechanisms which aim to make data analytics secure in a cloud environment and discuss current research challenges.