Cloud Computing Security Concerns

The increased degree of connectivity and the increasing amount of data has led many providers and in particular data centers to employ larger infrastructures with dynamic load and access balancing. By distributing and replicating data across servers on demand, resource utilization has significantly improved. The coming shift to cloud computing is a major change in the IT industry nowadays. As the name suggests, cloud computing lets developers write applications and use services that run in the cloud. Even though it has many characteristic features such as Elasticity, Reliability, Quality of Service, Agility and adaptability, Availability of services, Cost reduction, Pay per use, Improved time to market, Return of investment, etc. There are also a lot of security concerns about its privacy, security, data integrity, intellectual property management, audit trails, and several other issues. Security and privacy continue to be the top concerns in adopting cloud computing. Security risks are often more pronounced on the cloud because the company turns over custody of their data to the provider such as sensitive customer data and mission critical systems. Data, application and network back-up and redundancy will become very essential in these cases.