# Secure Cloud Infrastructure: A Survey on Issues, Current Solutions, and Open Challenges
## 7 Future Recommendations  
Based on the open challenges discussed so far, this section recommends some future research directions. Securing Hypervisor  
To distinguish between normal and abnormal behaviors, the cloud requires context-aware solutions to detect new and emerging attack patterns and respond immediately to prevent any possible harm to the cloud infrastructure. This should also take into account the dynamic nature of the cloud environment and the mobility of its customers. Additionally, customer preferences and his/her level of security awareness should be considered when building these solutions. Some recommendations for developing third-party auditing solutions should consider the following characteristics:  
Third-party auditing should be performed without retrieving a copy of the data; therefore, privacy is maintained. The data should be divided into parts and stored in an encrypted format in the cloud storage, thereby maintaining the confidentiality of the data. Verifying data integrity at the client's request to check whether the stored data are tampered with and inform the user as such. How to store data is also key to ensuring data availability. Some techniques can be used to ensure data availability and could be a focus for future research in securing cloud infrastructure as in the following points:  
* Data backups must be stored separately or in a distributed network. This means that the user will not lose information permanently if the storage part degrades or fails. * Update backups periodically, so that the user can restore the most current data versions. * Data loss prevention (DLP) tools help to minimize data violations and data center physical damage. These tools use cloud-based secure storage from third parties to avoid loss of data. Some DLP tools provide monitoring, blocking of threats, and forensic analysis. * Object storage uses advanced erasure coding to ensure data availability. Erasure coding blends data with parity data, and then breaks and distributes them throughout the storage environment. This could prevent component failure since users only need a subset of the shared data for data restoration. Data Remanence  
These solutions can be used to remove or minimize the presence of residual data as mentioned below. * Sterilization, also known as purging, refers to removing confidential information from a storage system to avoid ant recovery by a known method or technique. * Data encryption is an effective data protection method. _Network security_  
Some security recommendations for network security can be summarized as follows:  
* The internal communication of the cloud must adopt secure communication techniques such as HTTPS, and also the transmission channel must be encrypted by TLS. * Using anomaly detection solutions for HTTP requests that can effectively prevent any malicious network intrusion behaviors. * The cloud can use public security services such as web application firewalls (WAF), virtual firewalls, virtual bastion machines, virtual host protection and virtual database audit systems. _Access control and Identity management_  
The following are some security considerations for access control and identity management that should be considered by future research. * The cloud must be accessed only by the access key authentication. * The cloud must apply some security operation management such as (A) situation awareness that sort all assets and business systems in the cloud, (B) safe operation and maintenance that provide unified account management, unified authority management, unified interface management and unified ID authentication. * Single sign-on (SSO), currently applied in many cloud environments, could be incorporated with blockchain-based self-sovereign identity management approaches. This will give customers more autonomy in keeping and managing their credentials in a unified and more private manner.