Cloud Computing

No Silver Lining in Cloud Computing

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ENG 101

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Professor’s Name

No Silver Lining in Cloud Computing

Is saving a few dollars worth the tradeoff for hacking, eavesdropping, malicious attacks, and outages? In this increasingly competitive market, institutions such as businesses, federal governmental agencies, and universities are looking into cloud computing technology as a way to reduce overhead costs, capital assets, and maintenance costs despite the aforementioned risks. Cloud computing provides institutions with an alternative way of obtaining Information Technology (IT) services that on the surface seems like good business, but in reality, choosing to host data in the cloud makes the data more susceptible to security breaches and also to the loss of control over the way this data is maintained. This paper will discuss concerns with cloud computing security, the security risks associated with cloud computing, and data integrity.

The Cloud and Information Security

Cloud computing refers to the recent advent of housing an institution’s data and software on remote computer servers, often as a service provided by a third party company. According to Dlodlo (2011), cloud computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the software and hardware systems that support those services. Some major cloud computing providers are Amazon, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Software as a Service (SaaS) is referred to as a service, and the datacenter hardware and software is referred to as the cloud. Private cloud refers to the internal datacenters of an institution that are not made available to the public. The ability to purchase these resources on an as needed basis, and the savings from not having to pay capital cost for software and hardware, is the lure of the cloud.

“Information security can be viewed as including three functions: Access control, secure communications, and protection of private data” (Sehgal,...