CLOUD COMPUTING Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

CLOUD COMPUTING - Research Paper Example SQL injection or cross site scripting vulnerabilities have a high probability, as Google docs are one of the victims of them (Singh & Sharma, 2011). Moreover, threat of phishing is also always available, as automated emails and messages on cloud based applications can steal passwords, personal credentials and other personal information. Organization’s authentication and authorization policy do not addresses cloud security issues. In spite of having several security controls integrated within the cloud based applications, only a password is required to breach into the cloud based application. One of the recent security breaches of exploiting secure passwords that is called as Twitter gate (Singh & Sharma, 2011). Moreover, virtual machines on a single physical machine are shared with multiple instances. Every instance is connected to the Internet or virtual tunnels. This concludes, if a single machine is compromised, all the instances available in that machine are also compromis ed. In addition, risk of data corruption or storage that may not limited to memory storage, random access memory storage is also in the scope of cloud computing vulnerabilities (Singh & Sharma, 2011). 2 Cloud Computing Storage Issues The storage of cloud computing requires a lot of space, in fact humongous data centers where data is collected and managed. These data centers pose several threats and security risk that may impact these data storage machines. The threat may be from a professional hacker and also in the form of the cloud provider itself, if data is not adequately dealt with. A minor security incident or misconfiguration can lead to a system failure or unavailability. (OGIGAU-NEAMTIU, 2012) Moreover, another security breach occurred in 2009, password of an employee working on Twitter was hacked that resulted in breaching the email security questions page that was located in the Google apps account (Talbot 2010). In relation to that, one more incident occurred when data w as erased from one million T-mobile smart phones due to a server failure that was managing the data of these smart phones (Talbot 2010).As Peter Mell, who is a team lead of cloud security team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says, public cloud computing models are more vulnerable to threats, as every customer has access to a broad range of services and levels. Therefore, if any one of the services is breached, they gain access to all the data. As cloud-computing usage is increasing with its connection to the public through an Internet, new opportunities also originate for hackers, cyber terrorists, viruses and worms. These threats will increase and focus on cloud computing enables services and applications for stealing classified data, denial of service attacks on data centers etc. ‘Google apps’ is the major player in the market for providing ‘SaaS’, it was attacked and hacked. The report from cyber forensics indicated that the attacks were originated from China (Bisong & Rahman, 2011). The security and privacy in cloud computing are associated with data storage and data protection. Moreover, monitoring the utilization of resources available on the cloud by the service providers is also included. In order to secure the data in the cloud, it can be stored internally in the organization’s premises. (Talbot, 2012) Moreover, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in the US and Data Protection directives along with the EU are only two compliances from many other compliance concerns