Cloud computing security and privacy: Standards and regulations

Abstract

© 2017 Cloud computing is a distributed computation model over a large pool of shared and virtualized computing resources, such as storage, processing power, applications and services. It has received considerable attention from the research communities and the industry due to its practicality This kind of new computing represents a vision of providing computing services as public utilities like water and electricity. Cloud computing provides a number of benefits, including reduced IT costs, flexibility, increased collaboration, etc. However, the advent of cloud computing has posed a variety of new challenges for both cloud users and cloud service providers. Taking data privacy as an example, encryption is becoming a standard practice for both cloud users and cloud service providers, as a mechanism against unauthorized surveillance as well as malware. However, the introduction of encryption to cloud also leads to new problems such as key management, as well as the inability of cloud to provide some utilities such as data manipulation. Providing cloud as utilities is an active research area of interest, which includes how these encrypted data can be searched, shared or used as input for computation directly.