Cloud Computing : Using Remote Network Servers Via The Internet

Cloud computing is a fast growing information technology trend that many companies including Google, Microsoft, and IBM are currently looking to get a stake in as demand for the service grows. Cloud computing is the concept of allowing both individuals and businesses to store data and applications on remote servers (owned and operated by a third party company), rather than on their own hard drives and data centers. The service boasts the ability to securely access data and applications from just about any device with an internet connection, allowing for such services as streaming music from a personal collection from multiple devices, and even to business

Organizations use the Cloud in a variety of different service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and deployment models (Private, Public, Hybrid). There are a number of security issues/concerns associated with cloud computing but these issues fall into two broad categories: Security issues faced by cloud providers (organizations providing software-, platform-, or infrastructure-as-a-service via the cloud) and security issues faced by their customers.In most cases, the provider must ensure that their infrastructure is secure and that their clients’ data and applications are protected while the customer must ensure that the provider has taken the proper security measures to protect their information.

Security is typically ranked the top cloud computing adoption concern. Many feel that cloud is not yet a secure enough option for storing and processing mission critical or customer-sensitive data, and may never be. So it’s important to evaluate security solutions provided by various vendors to see what data protection you will be receiving from a specific cloud vendor for your mission critical and sensitive data. Comparison of security solutions provided by four well known cloud service providers is listed as below.

There are several security concerns that must be reviewed an addressed when selecting a vendor that will provide and host the cloud computing service. One major concern is user access control. Due to the availability of cloud computing anywhere with the internet it is important to make sure sensitive data is not accessed by unauthorized personnel. To address this issue, “Ask providers to supply specific information on the hiring and oversight of privileged administrators, and the controls over their access” (Brodkin, 2012). Data

As depicted in figure 3, the technical details, arrangements and management of the cloud service providers’ network is transparent to the cloud user. From the end of the cloud user, the service from the provider comes in the form of SaaS, PaaS or IaaS where the cloud user has no intention or worry about what goes on in the internal arrangement of the cloud service providers’ network. Any disruption of any form for whatever is the reason, deem to the cloud users either as service unavailability or quality deterioration – its affect and ways to counter this disruption is a critical part for the cloud infrastructure. Security issues might play a stimulating role as a driving factor for any aforementioned disruption.

There are several definitions of what exactly cloud computing is. The simplest explanation is that cloud computing is a means of renting computers, storage, and network capacity on an hourly basis from a company that already has these resources in its own data center and can make them available to you and your customers via the Internet (Smith, 2009). Cloud computing comes in three main formats: Infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service,

“2015 Future of Cloud Computing Survey “ describes The cloud has achieved the point where organizations are no more debating regardless of whether to utilize cloud, however how pervasively they will utilize it. The 2015 overview results highlight record levels of corporate reception of distributed computing, both for business capacities and in the more entangled IT ranges, particularly to run content administration and application advancement in the cloud. IT groups are at long last bouncing on board, seeing an astounding level of cloud appropriation this year, seizing back the reins on the innovation technique of their organizations. From the base to the top, computerized innovations conveyed from the cloud are getting to be separating components for more organizations.

People are moving towards cloud computing because it has many benefits for both at home use and for businesses. Some of these reasons are ease of use, saving of storage space on local hard drives, and a lower cost.

Several years after the emergence of cloud computing, most of people still confuse with its concept because different research institutes defined the term differently. With the development of cloud computing, its concept evolves gradually in years. According to the Wikipedia, the most recent definition of cloud computing is “the delivery of services of the computing a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network (typically the Internet).” Cloud computing, in one word, was termed as the many different types of virtualized applications and services that are moved into the “cloud” – a metaphor for the internet. Cloud computing providers maintain and control physical servers, and data is processed in the “cloud” provider’s environment which also delivers hosted services. For the user, the entire computing infrastructures virtually reside “in the cloud.” In many cases, devices that used to access these services and

cloud entities such as providers and users, and ii) the security solutions that must be taken to

Cloud computing is revolutionizing every aspect of Information Technology. Many businesses and organizations rely on their own internal IT departments to operate their specific applications, databases, and programs. Cloud allows them to cut ties with in-house servers and receive their complete IT needs from an external Cloud provider. Cloud is faster and easier to use than traditional infrastructures, often making it more cost effective. Several private companies have already switched to Cloud and the federal government has ordered every agency to identify at least three “must move” services and shift them to Cloud by mid 2012. (Scharff, 2011)

few years, cloud computing has grown from being a promising business concept to one of the fast

Cloud as the term signifies means the computers in a network to be used for data storage remotely and for maintenance. The cloud computing offers reductions in costs and also has increased scalability, reliability and flexibility in its own processes, and is considered as todays one of the most exciting technologies and has seen a rapid growth over the past ten years. The Cloud computing uses advanced level of computational

Cloud computing allows a group of services and networks which work together to provide storage and information. Cloud computing means resource offered as a rental over the Internet instead of storing information on your own drive you can directly use it on the Internet without downloading it.

An example is, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) could be rented for a digital bulletin board service. Amazon S3 is a storage that could also be rented. The fact about cloud computing service is that it is convenient and less expensive, this has paved ways for so many small businesses to scale above their expectations. however, the risk in cloud computing makes organizations vulnerable to cyber-attacks on a daily bases. Hackers are never tired of creating new techniques to exploit system vulnerabilities. Hackers has a way of tricking the cloud by inputting accurate but stolen information in the cloud to perform their illegal activities, thereby, gaining unauthorized access to a cloud server. Once an attack is successful on a cloud server the data stored in it, is no longer safe, especially sensitive data like personal identifiable information, account information and health record. Record shows that within the first 9 months in 2012, there was a huge data loss, about 1,047 data breach incident occurred. While the year before that 2011, there were data breach incident of 1,041 in the entire year. Among organizations that where affect, Epsilon and Stratfor were victims of data breaches. In these accident, hacker exploited the vulnerabilities in Epsilon system and exposed millions of customer's information stored in the database, these led to a great loss in the business . In