Security in cloud computing systems: A review of challenges and solutions for security in distributed computing environments

Cloud computing is rapidly emerging as the preferred computing environment, largely because of the manifold advantages that this paradigm offers in terms of scale, flexibility and economics of computing. While the benefits of cloud computing in comparison to traditional standalone computing environments are compelling, the shift in paradigm introduces unprecedented and varied challenges in data security, recovery, user privacy, access control, trust, notwithstanding legal issues. This paper lists the various challenges that are unique to cloud computing environments and also presents a comparative analysis of solutions and standards that have been presented towards mitigation of security risks in cloud computing.