Cloud Computing Data Security for the Masses

Abstract

The cloud offers little platform-level support or standardization for user data protection beyond data encryption at rest, most likely because doing so is nontrivial. Protecting user data while enabling rich computation requires both specialized expertise and resources that might not be readily available to most application developers. Cloud computing provides many benefits in terms of low cost and accessibility of data. Ensuring the security of cloud computing is a major factor in the cloud computing environment, as users often store sensitive information with cloud storage providers but these providers may be un-trusted. This paper surveys recent research related to single and multi-cloud security and addresses possible solutions. It is found that the research into the use of multi-cloud providers to maintain security has received less attention from the research community than has the use of single clouds. The data-protection-as-a-service cloud platform architecture dramatically reduces the per-application development effortrequired to offer data protection while still allowing rapid development and maintenance.