Abstract

Cloud computing has been gaining more acceptance thanks to the benefits it offers to customers including increased scalability, higher reliability, cost reduction, and higher accessibility. For example, customers such as small sized companies are able to offload the important tasks of data storage and computation because of these services offered by cloud computing providers (e.g. Amazon, Flexiscale, GoGrid, etc.). However, cloud computing still faces many challenges in its three different segments: “applications”, “platforms”, and “infrastructure”, not the least of which are security-related challenges. Security (more specifically, the integrity and confidentiality of data and computation) has been agreed to be the most important issue preventing from the popular adoption of cloud computing by companies.