Cloud Security: Issues and Concerns

The cloud has emerged as a successful computing paradigm allowing users and organizations to rely on external providers for storing and processing their data and making them available to others. An increasing important priority for the wide adoption and acceptance of cloud computing is the ability of data owners and users to have enforced and assess security guarantees. Guaranteeing security means ensuring confidentiality and integrity of data, accesses, and computations on them as well as ensuring availability of data and services to legitimate users and 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.