Security Risk Assessment of Cloud Computing Services in a Networked Environment

Different cloud computing service providers offer their customers' services with different risk levels. The customers wish to minimize their risks for a given expenditure or investment. This paper concentrates on consumers' point of view. Cloud computing services are composed of services organized according to a hierarchy of software application services, beneath them platform services which also use infrastructure services. Providers currently offer software services as bundles which include the software, platform and infrastructure services. Providers also offer platform services bundled with infrastructure services. Bundling services prevent customers from splitting their service purchases between a provider of software and a different provider of the underlying platform or infrastructure. In this paper the underlying assumption is the existence of a free competitive market, in which consumers are free to switch their services among providers. The proposed model is aimed at the potential customer who wishes to compare the risks of cloud service bundles offered by providers. The article identifies the major components of risk in each level of cloud computing services. A computational scheme is offered to assess the overall risk on a common scale. Keywords—Cloud Computing; Risk Management; Information Security; Cloud Risks; Software as a service; Platform as a service; Infrastructure as a service