Cyber Security Considerations When Moving to Public Cloud Computing

INTRODUCTION The fundamental shift known as cloud computing has the capability to level the playing field for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) who find it difficult to acquire and operate the type of information technology found in large organizations. Entrepreneurs, startups, medium and small companies would have new alternatives and opportunities that were not available to them previously. These benefits would save the organizations millions of dollars because they will have the choice to only rent the necessary computing power, storage space, and communications capacity from a large cloud computing provider that has all of these assets connected to the Internet. Cloud computing can be deployed in four ways: Private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud and community cloud. Private cloud refers to the management of data and processes within the organization; public cloud describes the situation whereby resources are dynamically provisioned over the Internet, via web applications/web services from an off-site third-party provider who shares resources. Hybrid cloud consists of multiple internal and/or external providers while cloud computing refers to a situation where several organizations jointly construct and share the same infrastructure as well as policies and concerns (Yang & Chen, 2010). This paper deals specifically with public cloud computing. Public cloud computing enables organizations to spend money only on services they actually receive and consume with the flexibility to adjust the amount of resources they need based on their unique circumstances. While public cloud computing provides immense benefits, it introduces huge security and privacy risks which makes some organizations apprehensive. Many studies have been conducted into the security risks associated with public cloud computing, but what is lacking is determining whether any of these security breaches could potentially derail the future and momentum of public cloud computing. This paper examines the potential and possibility of data security concerns to derail the future of public cloud computing. The paper identifies measures that could be employed by providers to boost the confidence of existing cloud users and attract potential users. LITERATURE REVIEW Cloud computing has been touted as a technology which is gaining momentum at an alarming rate (Rimal, Choi, & Lumb, 2009). Cloud computing has been defined in many different ways by many researchers (Bisong & Rahman, 2011) but the most comprehensive definition is the definition provided by (Brandl, 2010), who defines cloud computing as "collections of IT resources, (servers, databases, and applications) which are available on an on-demand basis, provided by a service company, available through the Internet, and provide resource pooling among multiple users." Classification of cloud computing into different layers is based on the type of services provided by the cloud. At the lowest level of the service model is Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). The infrastructure layer provides basic components such as Central Processing Units (CPU's), memory, and storage (Jensen, Schwenk, Gruschka and Iacono, 2009). An example of IaaS is Amazon's Elastic Compute. Directly above the IaaS is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). PaaS provides developers with a platform for carrying out their functions including the provision of systems and environments for developing, testing, deploying and hosting of web applications (Rimal et al., 2009). An example of PaaS is the Google App Engine. Paas offers clients/developers hundreds of readily available tools and services (Rimal et al., 2009). At the top of the service model is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). SaaS provides clients with "ready to use applications" (Jensen et al., 2009) and it is an alternative to applications that are run locally in organizations (Vaquero, Rodero-Merino, Caceres, & Lindner, 2009). …