Cloud Security: Issues and Concerns

The cloud has emerged as a successful computing paradigm, allowing users and organizations to rely on external providers to store and process their data and make it available to others. An increasingly important priority, if there is to be wide adoption and acceptance of cloud computing, is for data owners and users to have security guarantees. Guaranteeing security means ensuring confidentiality and integrity of data, access to it, and computations with it, and ensuring availability of data and services to legitimate users in compliance with agreements with the providers. In this chapter, we present an overview of the main security issues and concerns arising in the cloud scenario, in particular with respect to the storage, management, and processing of data.