CLOUD COMPUTING

Privacy Problems and Security Risks Associated With Employing Cloud Computing Services

Privacy Problems and Security Risks Associated With Employing Cloud Computing Services

Introduction

In the past few years there has been an explosive growth in computer usage for business, government and educational purposes. At the same time, the global nature of the Internet has opened up global markets and global competition. The combination of increased computer usage, global collaboration, and competition has brought with it the accompanying need to maximize the use of available resources while minimizing costs. One area of growing interest for meeting these needs is the use of cloud computing to centralize computing and information management functions for large, often geographically dispersed organizations and individual people.

Cloud computing is an approach where information technology services and capabilities are delivered to an organization or individual over the Internet by a centralized provider, often for a fee. Cloud computing has a number of distinguishing characteristics. The computing resources are held by the provider. Computing resources are accessible over the Internet via personal computers, laptops, smart phones, and personal digital assistants. A cloud computer provides access to programs, storage, processing, applications, and software development. This access is granted after an agreement is negotiated between the cloud computing provider and the recipient of services. With a commercial cloud computing provider, resources are normally available, for a set fee, based on usage. For the majority of cloud vendors that charge for cycles or time used, an accounting and billing procedure is needed, with contractual terms agreed upon before service is granted. Cloud computing that is available within the public organization sector, such as from the National Science Foundation, is provided free of charge to approved users. For example, the University of Illinois was granted funding to establish a cloud computing center for data intensive computing applications for use by NSF-funded researchers. Examples of cloud computing given by Robinson include software as a service for providing computing applications, and data processing and storage services. This availability of computing capabilities for remote computing access to users around the globe is changing the world balance of power in computing. It raises several security and privacy related issues, which have been ignored by the researchers in the past. This paper in this connection, will discuss both advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing, so that a conclusion can be drawn which one is more effective.

Cloud Computing

The term Cloud computing is inspired from the cloud symbols that we use in flowcharts and diagrams for representing Internet. Users all around the world maintain a number of data including personal details, bookmarks, music files, pictures and many more on servers that are accessible using network. While seminal cloud computing research was published by Chellappa in 1997, adoption of cloud computing has been a fairly recent phenomenon. This term began surfacing commonly in the literature around 2006 and refers to computing over the Internet. By 2008, cloud computing was receiving extensive research interest and had surpassed grid computing in the amount of media ...