A Survey of Security Concerns, Mechanisms and Testing in Cloud Environment

Distributed Computing is a form of computing in which a group of independent systems are connected to a computer network. Cloud Computing is one of the emerging domain in the field of Computer Science. With the help of cloud computing, the computing services can be delivered over the internet. Before the advent of cloud computing, the business applications were found to be complicated, expensive and the software and hardware requirements of these applications were daunting. These issues were resolved in cloud computing since the hardware and software are maintained by the cloud vendors. Another advantage of using cloud computing is that it follows pay-per-use technology which means that the user only pays for the resources he/ she consumes. The main goal of the security principles in cloud computing is to ensure that the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability of the data are preserved. This paper presents an extensive survey of the security threats; its countermeasures and testing that are available in cloud computing.