Available Online at www.ijcsmc.com International Journal of Computer Science and Mobile Computing A Monthly Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology ISSN 2320–088X IJCSMC, Vol. 2, Issue. 4, April 2013, pg.502 – 506 RESEARCH ARTICLE © 2013, IJCSMC All Rights Reserved 502 Customer Security Issues in Cloud Computing Nimmati Satheesh 1 1 Assistant professor, PSNA college of engineering and Technology, Dindigul-624224, India 1 nimmatisatheesh@gmail.com Abstract— The Cloud computing concept offers dynamically scalable resources provisioned as a service over the Internet. Economic benefits are the main driver for the Cloud, since it promises the reduction of capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx). In order for this to become reality, however, there are still some challenges to be solved. Amongst these are security and trust issues, since the user's data has to be released to the Cloud and thus leaves the protection-sphere of the data owner. Most of the discussions on these topics are mainly driven by arguments related to organizational means. This paper focuses on technical security issues arising from the usage of Cloud services and especially by the underlying technologies used to build this cross-domain Internet-connected collaboration. I. INTRODUCTION Despite of the fact that industry big players like Google, Amazon, Sales Force, Microsoft and others have products and services under the umbrella of ‘cloud computing’, ‘cloud ready’ or other similar denomination, there is no consensus about what exactly cloud computing is.. It is a new paradigm, not just a distributed computing paradigm, but also a new business paradigm. It is intended to provide computing power, software and storage and even a distributed datacenter infrastructure on demand. In order to make these characteristics viable, cloud computing makes use of existing technologies, such as virtualization, distributed computing, grid computing, utility computing and Internet. However, even those industry big players have products and services available as also a definition of what are the basic cloud computing underlying technologies, a customer intending to better understand and profit from this new paradigm faces several concerns, especially the ones related to security. Considering the customer point of view, we have made an extensive research to obtain what are the main security problems pointed in the available literature for cloud computing security, aiming to list and discuss the more recurrent ones. II. CLOUD COMPUTING CATEGORIES Attempts to cloud computing standardization are being done by some groups, including governments and industry. One effort that can help to avoid misunderstandings, by putting everyone to talk the same language, is the definition of cloud computing and its categories. As of this writing, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is one of them, having defined the cloud as composed of four deployment models, three service models and five essential characteristics. The Cloud Security Alliance [6], which formal debut was made at RSA Conference 2009 releasing a white paper entitled “Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing”, has taken these definitions to work through its guidance, explaining that the motivation is “to bring coherence and consensus around a common language so we can focus on use cases rather than semantic nuance. A. Deployment models The definitions of the deployment models listed next are taken as it is from the NIST definition, although other researches mention this deployment models with similar definitions.