Analysis of virtualization security threats and a novel model for data security in cloud computing

Abstract

The Cloud Computing, one of today s most powerful technologies, can reduce costs associated with computing as it is increasingly flexible and scalable for computer processes. Users are unknown about their data stored on a cloud. Since a few years, cloud computing has grown to one of the fastest-growing parts of the IT industry. Due to the outsourcing of enterprise IT assets being hosted on third-party cloud computing platforms, results in a loss of security control over the cloud-hosted assets. Moreover, the lack of security constraints in the Service Level Agreement (SLA) between cloud providers and customers results in a little loss of trust. Security being the major issue for public cloud, it hampers the growth of the same. Several methodologies are introduced for data security in the cloud. However, still few organizations have less trust in cloud providers due to the lack of backup recovery and data privacy (Data theft is also main issue) related concerns. Different cloud service providers offer many services to users like Computing, Storage, Database, Payment, Billing, Email, Web applications, Infrastructure and other Business Process Management. Every application has a different pricing model according to its services. Pricing Model, Server OS can be different with deployment model too. One of the major objective of all service providers is to secure data resided in the cloud. newline newlineFor building cloud infrastructure, virtualization is a core component used to separate a single physical machine into multiple virtual machines in a cost-effective way. With so many benefits there are few issues which should be solved. Implementation of virtualization involves a high degree of uncertainty and consequently, a great possibility of failures. Even after providing many security features, may service providers are still facing some security related issues. To enhance security in cloud-based applications, in this research a novel model (Tortoise model) is proposed to enhance the security of data stored in the cloud.