Cloud Security: Services, Risks, and a Case Study on Amazon Cloud Services

Abstract

Recent advances have witnessed the success and popularity of cloud computing, which represents a new business model and computing paradigm. The feature of on-demand provisioning of computational, storage, and bandwidth resources has driven modern businesses into cloud services. The cloud is considered cutting edge technology and it is solely relied on by many large technology, business, and media companies such as Netflix or Salesforce.com. However, in addition to the benefit at hand, security issues have been a long-term concern for cloud computing and are the main barriers of the widespread use of cloud computing. In this paper, we briefly describe some basic security concerns that are of particular interest to cloud technology. We investigate some of the basic cloud concepts and discuss cloud security issues. Amazon Web Services is used as a case study for discussing common cloud terminology. Data security, as well as some cloud specific attacks is introduced. The current state and the future progression of cloud computing is discussed.