Essential Cloud Security Features in Windows Azure

Cloud computing technology is recently gaining widespread popularity among business owners and consumers/users for hosting and delivering services over the Internet. This technology offers users on-demand access to shared resources, services, and applications with the Internet access by eliminating the need for tedious installation procedures. Security and privacy issues in cloud computing is one of the major barriers for the wide adoption of this emerging technology. In this paper, we first discuss the security and privacy guidelines pertinent to the public cloud computing environment as described by NIST. We then investigate different security features of the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform and analyze how the security and privacy guidelines described by NIST are implemented in this cloud platform.