Evaluating security and privacy in cloud computing services: A Stakeholder's perspective

The cloud computing paradigm is now adopted in many organizations in various fields because of its low cost, high availability and scalability features. Healthcare, education, business, and many other domains look at cloud computing as an endeavor to solve the continuous shortage in volume, infrastructure, accessibility, and monitoring potency. However, moving data to the cloud implies shifting control of the customer's data to the cloud service provider indefinitely. Hence, the security and privacy of the customer's information becomes an important issue. Being an emerging field, there is a lack of experience in cloud security and lack of consensus on security and privacy. Assessing and comparing among potential cloud computing services, poses an issue for novice customers interested to move their work to the cloud to choose security options that are sufficient and robust at the same time. This paper attempts to identify and categorize a list of attributes which reflect the various aspects of cloud security and privacy. These attributes can be used to assess and compare cloud computing services so that consumers can make well educated choices. Cloud service providers can use them to build and/or offer better cloud solutions.