Security Concerns in Cloud Computing Research Paper

Security Concerns in Cloud Computing - Research Paper Example For instance, information of an organization needs to be protected and is the ultimate responsibility of the board of director for which they are also liable. Likewise, transferring information on the cloud determines that it is not manageable by the organization anymore and any consequence or a breach of data occurring on the vendor side will be a prime threat to the organization. Therefore, information security is the part of due care and due diligence that is derived from the responsible employees of the organization. Cloud Deployment Models It is the prime responsibility of the organization to protect intellectual property and confidential information that may be related to customer personal information, trade secrets, patents etc. Breach of anyone of these classified information types cab result in a permanent loss of business and ultimately bankruptcy that may result in legal and regulatory compliance. Likewise, before making any strategy for transferring critical applications to the cloud, it is important to analyze deployment and service models of cloud computing. The correct choice needs to be made in order to align business requirements to the correct deployment and service model without any unnecessary risk. There are three service models for cloud computing i.e. infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and software as a service (Wilshusen, 2011). Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is comprised of three components i.e. software, platform and infrastructure. Organizations only provide software and platform and infrastructure is provided by a third party cloud computing vendor. The second service models i.e. platform as a service (PaaS) also comprises of three components i.e. software, platform and infrastructure. Organizations only provide a software or application that will be executed on the third party or vendor’s platform and infrastructure. The third service model also includes the similar three components as mentioned before and called as software as a service (SaaS). Organizations only utilize services provided by the vendors in terms of applications that can be accessed by the Internet. All the three components i.e. software, platform and infrastructure are the property of the vendor (Wilshusen, 2011). In figure 1.1, cloud deployment models are demonstrated Figure 1.1 (Retreived from :Wilshusen, G. C. (2011). INFORMATION SECURITY: Additional guidance needed to address cloud computing concerns. GAO Reports, , 1.) Cloud Service Models After gaining the insight mechanisms of different deployment models of the cloud, the next important aspect is the service models. Cloud computing provides four service models for organizations to operate on. As shown in Fig 1.2, cloud service models are illustrated. Figure 1.2 (Retreived from :Wilshusen, G. C. (2011). INFORMATION SECURITY: Additional guidance needed to address cloud computing concerns. GAO Reports, , 1.) Organizations must choose the relevant client model, a s it will be proportional to the business or customer requirements and may differ from organization to organization and business types. The first service mode is called as the ‘Private Cloud’