Effective methodologies for enhancing security to outsourced data in cloud computing environment

Abstract

Cloud computing has grown in the last few years from a promising business concept to one of the fastest growing segments of IT Enterprise. It is a technology which provides computation, software, data accessand storage services.This technology does not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. Cloud resources are delivered to the end-users through Web services. In the current scenario, organizations produce a large amount of information that includes personal data, health records and financial information. These organizations expect effective security, availability, scalability and durability for the critical and sensitive data. Many organizations are using cloud storage for storing their information because of the attractive features offered by cloud computing.Enterprises enjoy on-demand high quality services offered by the cloud service providers by storing data in the cloud servers. The data or the information stored in a cloud server is referred as data outsourcing and they are managed by the cloud service providers. Organizations delegate the storage and management of their data by outsourcing data storage,to a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) with pre-defined Service Level Agreements(SLAs) that include payment of fees calculated in GB/month. Migrating data to the cloud servers is a cause of serious concern on data confidentiality and integrity since users may not retain a local copy of outsourced data.Data owners no longer physically possess their sensitive data in this storage model and it has raised new security challenges. Security violations include data loss, unauthorized data access and modifications. Efficient verification and validation of the data in the cloud servers has become a great challenge. The traditional methods used to achieve confidentiality and integrity cannot be directly adopted in the cloud as the data is stored and accessed from a remote site. newline