Cloud Computing Security: Risks, Solutions, and Best Practices

This report provides a detailed analysis of cloud computing security, covering various aspects such as cloud infrastructure models, service models, and deployment models. It identifies key security problems, including security issues, privacy concerns, application vulnerabilities, and threat issues such as data breaches, data loss, account hijacking, insecure APIs, denial-of-service attacks, malicious insider threats, and abuse of cloud services. The report also explores various solutions to these challenges, including vulnerability analysis, choosing trusted cloud vendors, implementing secure cloud service usage, checking security events, adhering to data storage regulations, implementing data recovery facilities, employing enterprise architecture best practices, and enforcing access control and identification management. The report aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the security landscape in cloud computing and offers practical insights for mitigating risks and ensuring data protection.

Running head: CLOUD COMPUTING SECURITY
Cloud Computing Security
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s note

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Applications of cloud computing...............................................................................................3
Cloud computing service model.................................................................................................3
Cloud deployment model...........................................................................................................4
Cloud Computing Security Problems.........................................................................................5
Security issues........................................................................................................................5
Privacy issues.........................................................................................................................5
Application issues..................................................................................................................6
Threat issues...........................................................................................................................6
Conclusion................................................................................................................................10
References................................................................................................................................11

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Introduction
Cloud computing is an information technology pattern which allows access to a
shared pool of higher-level services and configurable system resources. The resources can be
acquired from the Internet sources through web-based tools and the applications (Almorsy,
Grundy & Müller, 2016). The cloud computing provides the cloud base storage facility to the
organizations or individuals.
The report explains the cloud infrastructure model, cloud deployment model. The
report illustrates the issues related to cloud computing and the possible solutions by which
cloud business can be conducted effectively.
Applications of cloud computing
The organizations can choose to store files in the cloud rather than local storage
device or proprietary hard drive. The users can access the files anywhere anytime and from
any devices. The cloud computing offers several advantages. Cloud computing reduces the
hardware cost and the maintenance cost, it facilitates accessibility all-round the globe. The
cloud computing offers flexibility in the business operations. It also automated the process of
the business activities (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). The customer need not have to
worry about the updates or the upgrades. The cloud vendors daily update the cloud OS, cloud
applications and the cloud services. Thus both the organizations and the individuals can be
benefitted with the help of the cloud computing.
Cloud computing service model
Cloud computing services are classified as-
Infrastructure as Service (IaaS): The cloud vendor offers virtualized computational
resources, computer network and storage. IaaS typically hosts the infrastructure components

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on the prevalent data centre, which includes networking hardware, servers as well as storage
(Khalil, Khreishah & Azeem, 2014). IaaS is based on virtualization technology. Amazon EC2
is one of the famous IaaS providers.
Platform as a service (PaaS): PaaS providers offer platform, tools and other business
services by which organizations using the cloud services can design, deploy and manage
cloud applications over the cloud platform (Srinivasan, 2014). PaaS provider generally hosts
software and hardware on its own infrastructure. Google Apps and Microsoft Windows
Azure offer PaaS service.
Software as a Service: Software as a service is one software distribution model where
the third-party provider hosts applications and a third party makes all those applications
available to the individuals or the organizations over the Internet. SaaS eliminates the
hardware expenses, maintenance and provisioning.
Cloud deployment model
Public cloud
The public cloud infrastructure is situated on the premises of cloud vendor or cloud
service provider. The individuals or the organisations can share the same infrastructure pool
with limited configuration. Any individuals can access the cloud storage base and can store
the data in the same cloud storage base (Ali, Khan & Vasilakos, 2015). It is known to provide
scalable, dynamically provisioned and virtualized resources available over the internet.
Private cloud
The private cloud infrastructure is usually owned by only one user and the cloud
resources are not shared. The individuals have the physical control over the cloud

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infrastructure and it is considered more secured compared to public cloud. In case of public
cloud, everyone shares the same cloud infrastructure.
Hybrid cloud
Hybrid cloud is actually a mixture of both public cloud infrastructure and private
cloud infrastructure (Zhao, Li & Liu, 2014). The hybrid cloud offers the flexibility where the
individuals have the opportunity to use the private cloud infrastructure alongside the public
cloud infrastructure.
Cloud Computing Security Problems
There are several issues associated with cloud computing and this report explains all the
issues-
Security issues
Data at rest is the security concern in case of cloud computing. Users store all the
sensitive data in the cloud and these data can be accessed can be anywhere anytime and from
any device. Data theft can lead to data loss for the cloud vendors. The data loss occurs if the
server shuts down all of a sudden (Wei et al., 2014). The data loss can also occur with the
effect of the natural disaster. The physical data location is considered to be one of the security
issues in cloud computing.
Privacy issues
The employees’ data and the customers’ data are stored in the cloud database. The
data can get hacked due to the security breaches. The hackers can steal all the customers’
details, and use for their benefits. The hackers can modify all the confidential data of the
customers and can even delete all the files of the system (Hashem et al., 2015). The
customers’ privacy can get threatened due to the hackers’ attack. The organizations store

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financial data and other confidential data. The loss of the confidential data can lead to privacy
risk. The cloud computing can be used effectively if security is implied properly by cloud
vendors and the users. The cloud vendors must have to follow the regulatory reforms and
they will have to make sure that customers have trust in privacy and security of data.
Application issues
The cloud vendors should monitor and maintain the security of cloud applications and
they will have to make sure that the organizations and cloud database remain safe from the
clutches of the malicious attack. The cloud applications can be hacked by the attackers and
the sensitive data can get stolen.
Threat issues
Data Breaches
Organizations store all the confidential data of the employees and the customers in the
cloud database. All the financial data of the employees and customers are stored by the
management staffs in the database. The attackers, however, can gain entry to the
organizations' system and database and can conduct a malicious activity (Singh, Jeong &
Park, 2016). The hackers or the attackers take the opportunity of the insecure network and
insecure system and makes that system vulnerable.
Data loss
The organizations store data in the cloud database. The data stored in the database can
get corrupted or damaged due to the computer sudden shutdown. The data can get lost due to
server shutdown as well. A natural disaster like earthquake and fire also leads to data loss
(Pancholi & Patel, 2016). If the organizations do not keep a backup of the data, there is a
possibility of data loss.

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Account Hijacking
The hackers hijack one’s account and the hackers try to imitate the users. The hackers
enter into user’s account unethically and conduct malicious activities. The intruders can send
false information, can manipulate the data. No native APIs are required for the users to
register login into their database and system (Hussein & Khalid, 2016). For this reason, the
organizations have pretty high chance of account hijacking.
Insecure APIs threat
APIs are used in the organization to accumulate logs from the applications, it helps to
integrate the storage components and the database. API is one of the ways that the mobile
application can connect with back-end services and connect with the website. APIs provide
the facility to authenticate users (Chang, Kuo & Ramachandran, 2016). Thus activity
monitoring, API from the authentication and access control must be configured properly to
safeguard the organizations.
Denial of Service attack
The intruders hack the system and cloud account and sabotage the system. The DoS
attack restricts the legitimate users to use their own system and cloud account and database.
DoS attack can cause severe harm to the users as DoS can refrain users to use the cloud
services (Botta et al., 2016). The users will not be able to use the cloud account and the cloud
services. They will also not be able to complete the task within the stipulated deadline.
Malicious intruders’ attack
The current employees and the former employees of the organization can be threat
and risks for organizations. The employees can steal the vital data of the organization. The
employees can modify the data and delete the data. They can share all those important data

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with some other enterprises (Rao & Selvamani, 2015). Those employees also share the cloud
account’s data; sometimes they change the password as well. Those employees get access to
the cloud account and destroy those files. Thus the entire business gets disrupted due to the
insider attack.
Abuse of cloud service
Most of the cloud vendors do not apply a strong registration system. The individuals
or the organizations with a valid credit card may register. Soon after the registration, they can
start using the cloud database (Tan, Jia & Han, 2015). The hackers via brute force attack get
access to the system and database.
Sharing technological issue
IaaS cloud vendors offer services in an efficient way by sharing of infrastructure.
However, the IaaS is not suitable for the strong isolation properties for a multi-tenant
architecture.
Cloud Computing Security Solutions
Vulnerability analysis
The Intrusion Detection System has the capability to detect the cyber attacks, and it
provides solutions so that the cloud computing threats can be mitigated (Ahmed & Hossain,
2014). All the organizations must adopt the intrusion detection system to safeguard one’s
cloud account, system and database.
Trusted Cloud vendor
The organisations must choose the cloud vendors wisely. The cloud vendors like
Amazon AWS and Microsoft is known to provide the better cloud computing services.

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Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure come with advanced security features as well by which
the organisations can securely conduct the business activities over the cloud. CloudCmp
provides the details with the comparison among all the cloud vendors like Amazon AWS,
Microsoft Azure, DropBox. The individuals and the organisations can choose the cloud
vendor in terms of budget, in terms of in terms of features.
Using cloud services wisely
The cloud vendor should strengthen their registration and login procedures so that no
one can access the cloud account so easily.
Checking security events
The cloud vendors and the organisations must make an appropriate agreement. The
organisations must follow all the policies and the guidelines properly and should use the
cloud services. On the other hand, the cloud vendors will have to take full responsibility if
any security breaches or data loss occurs (Khalil, Khreishah & Azeem, 2014). The cloud
service providers must report contingency, fulfil promises and must provide break
remediation to ensure the security of cloud data stored by the organisations.
Regulations for data storage
There are various data storage regulations among which the EU, HIPAA and PCI DSS
are considered the best. The cloud vendors must cater security solutions compliant with the
mentioned regulations (Srinivasan, 2014). All these data protection policies or regulations
will help to safeguard individuals' data or organisations' data.
Data recovery facilities

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Cloud vendors must take the responsibility to recover data in case of data loss due to
certain issues. The cloud vendors will have to back up the users’ files and must promise to
recover the confidential data of the users. They must adopt solutions to assure data recovery
in case of any danger (Ali, Khan & Vasilakos, 2015). The cloud vendors must use the
effective disk management in case of disaster management. The cloud vendors can adopt
other security solutions like changing dirty page threshold, prediction of risky devices and its
removal.
Enterprise Architecture
The organisations and the individuals those who are using the cloud services will have
to take responsibility to safeguard data from their ends. They must use the advanced security
solutions provided by the cloud vendors like the proxy server, firewalls, routers and servers.
Access Control
Cloud data access control must be implemented by the cloud vendors. The cloud
vendors will have to take the responsibility and will have to make sure that only the
legitimate users enter the system and no one else (Zhao, Li & Liu, 2014). The users will be
asked every time when the users try to enter the system. Data breaches can get significantly
reduce if the cloud vendors limit the access control.
Identification management
The cloud vendors can take the help of digital media and digital data to strengthen the
data access control. The users should not only use the username, password but also, they
should use the digital data to gain access to the cloud account (Wei et al., 2014). Leakage-
resilient authentication can be helpful in improving the security services of the cloud
database.

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Conclusion
It can be concluded from the discourse that cloud computing is helpful to conduct the
business activities online. The organisations can get agile, cost-effective service with the help
of the cloud computing. The report has illustrated the cloud architecture in details. Along
with that, the cloud security issues have been elaborated in the report. The security solutions
have been explained in the report well. Recommendations have been made in the report
following which the cloud vendors must provide secured cloud services so that the users can
enjoy cloud services as well.

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References
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cloud. International Journal of Network Security & Its Applications, 6(1), 25.
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and challenges. Information sciences, 305, 357-383.
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Chang, V., Kuo, Y. H., & Ramachandran, M. (2016). Cloud computing adoption framework:
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