SECURITY CHALLENGES IN PUBLIC CLOUD- A SURVEY ARCHANA PANDITA Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology Offshore Campus Rak Al-Khaimah, United Arab Emirates ABSTRACT Cloud computing is a new way of delivering computing services ranging from data storage and processing to software, such as email handling. These services are now available right away, commitment-free and on-demand. Cloud computing is a approach of computing over the internet. The word cloud is an allegory for Internet. It is a new way for the delivery of IT services on the internet. The main attractions in Cloud computing are its usability and cost-effectiveness. The common characteristics most shared are scalability of vastly available and reliable collective computing resources, secure access to metered services from nearly anywhere, and displacement of data from inside to outside the organization. While aspects of these characteristics have been realized to a certain extent, cloud computing remains a work in progress. This publication provides an overview of the infrastructure to a public cloud environment and security and privacy challenges related to public cloud computing and considerations that should be taken when outsourcing data, applications, and infrastructure to a public cloud environment are also pointed out KEYWORDS: Cloud Computing, Public Cloud Computing Infrastructure, Establishing Requirements, Security and Privacy Challenges INTRODUCTION Cloud computing is being paid a great deal of attention both in academics and industries, from research scholars to users. Cloud computing is a subscription based service which provides networked storage space and computer resources. It is a computing paradigm, where a large pool of systems is connected in private or public networks, to provide dynamically scalable infrastructure for application, data and file storage. With the dawn of this technology, the application hosting, storage, delivery and cost of computation are reduced appreciably. Without worrying about any management or maintenance of actual resources, database resources can be accessed through internet remotely with Cloud computing for as long as needed. The basic cloud computing model is shown below Figure 1: Basic Cloud Computing Model International Journal of Computer Science and Engineering (IJCSE) ISSN 2278-9960 Vol. 2, Issue 3, July 2013, 123-130 © IASET