Abstract

The promise of the cloud is appealing: reduced costs, greater agility, flexibility, scalability and potentially greater security. At the same time, IT organizations recognize that the cloud introduces a number of issues related to security, data integrity, compliance, service level agreements and data architecture that must be addressed. Therefore, the adoption of cloud services is being tempered by a significant level of uncertainty. Numerous surveys indicate that the top concerns for moving to the cloud are security, performance and availability. In other words, enterprises are looking for assurances that they are not adding risk to the business by leveraging the cloud. For many, moving to the cloud is still a leap of faith. Different cloud deployment models-public, private, or hybrid have different security vulnerabilities and risks. Generally, risk increases from greater degrees of multitenancy among increasingly unknown participants. The objective of this article is to insist the fact that cloud security begins with and adds to, well-defined enterprise security; it also introduces a new cloud security model called Cloud Security NXT.

Keywords:

Cloud computing, cloud security, private cloud, public cloud,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.