Cloud computing risks & security concerns Essay

Cloud computing risks & security concerns - Essay Example They could be deployed as private, solely for an organisation; public, accessible by the public; community, shared by organisation; hybrid, bringing together multiple clouds between which application and data portability could occur; and partner, offered to a limited and definite number of parties (Pearson & Yee 2013). With cloud computing, organisations do not have to invest in physical infrastructure. Instead, they contract computing services based on demand. This therefore presents immense benefits and cost savings to organisations. For this reason, over 33% of UK companies compute in the cloud (Buyya, Broberg & Goscinski 2011). However, the technology has aroused numerous risk and security concerns in organisations across the world. This paper reviews the risks associated with cloud computing and based on the three service models of this technology, the security concerns would be evaluated. This would inform the recommendations put forth to foster data, network and infrastructure security. There are three layers of cloud services referring to the varied types of service models with each providing discrete capabilities. According to Pearson and Yee (2013), consumer capabilities involve the use of the applications in the cloud infrastructure of the provider in the Software as a Service, SaaS model. Clients access the applications through a thin interface like a web browser using their devices as per their demand and pay as per use. In Platform as a Service, PaaS, the consumer would be given the capability to deploy individual applications onto the cloud infrastructure without the installation of tools or any platform on their machines. It provides platform layer resources that could be used in building higher-level services. Finally, the Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS model provides consumers with the capability to provision storage, networks, processing and other basic computing resources but would not control or