A Survey of Cloud Computing Security Challenges, Issues and their Countermeasures

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm that provides on demand access to various resources such as servers, storage, applications, networking etc., over the internet. Cloud computing enables access to shared pool of resources, which are managed by third party cloud service providers. It comes with wide range of benefits such as low operating cost, efficiency, scalability, flexibility, etc. The cloud users can access different services and/or resources at anytime and from anywhere on pay per use basis. Hence many individual users, organizations, and businesses are moving towards cloud computing and sharing large amount of data on cloud. However, the security concern is the biggest barrier for wide adoption of cloud computing. The security issues exist in context of infrastructure, data and storage, access control in cloud environment. This paper explores various security issues in all these perspectives. The paper briefly reviews the security issues at infrastructure level, data level, and also discusses the concept of Identity and Access Control in cloud. Also the different solutions to avoid or alleviate the security issues in cloud environment are discussed.