A Comprehensive Methodology for Data Security and Privacy in Cloud Computing Systems

Abstract

Cloud computing encompasses computing with a pool of virtualized computer resources. A cloud provides for self-recovering highly-scalable programming models, workloads to recover from hardware/software failures and rebalance allocations, can host different workloads and allows workloads to be deployed/scaled-out on-demand by rapid provisioning of virtual or physical machines. The idea is to move desktop computing to a service-oriented platform using server clusters and huge databases at data centers. Cloud computing has become a standard method of software operation for many businesses. However, challenges are being faced by both research and professional cloud computing communities on optimized architectures, quality reliability, data security and privacy fronts. Services offered in cloud computing face the overwhelming challenges to ensure the proper physical, logical and personnel security controls, especially when considering the fact that cloud computing moves the application software and databases to the large data centers and in doing so the management of the data and services may not be fully trustworthy. In this paper, the main focus is given to highlight and investigate the data storage from perspective of threats and attacks and potential solution strategies. The paper also proposes an effective and flexible distributed scheme with two salient features, i.e., achieving the integration of storage correctness insurance and data error localization.