RESEARCH IN CLOUD SECURITY: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS VAISHALI SINGH 1 & S. K. PANDEY 2 1 Department of Computer Science, St. Xavier’s College, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India 2 Department of Information Technology, Board of Studies, The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India ABSTRACT Cloud computing continues to be boasted as a major breakthrough in IT management. With the rapid growth as well as demand of Cloud computing, the major concern is on its security and privacy, which is determined by the policies, controls and technologies needed to protect the data, applications, and the related infrastructure of Cloud computing. These challenges impose several new research questions to the research community to ensure proper security of the IT infrastructure. The goal of this paper is to provide the recent advancements and a broad overview of the existing literature covering various dimensions of the Cloud security. The paper also includes various directions for future research in Cloud security based on the related published work and industry trends. This may be very useful, particularly for the entry level researchers, who wish to conduct the research in these related areas. KEYWORDS: Cloud Security, Cloud Threats, Cloud Computing, Advances in Cloud, IT Management INTRODUCTION Cloud computing is a technique to store and access data or a program through internet instead of computer hard drive. Cloud is a metaphor for the Internet [31]. Cloud provides efficient computing by centralizing data reposition, processing and information measures. A simple example of Cloud computing is E-mailing. The Cloud look after the Email management software and server which is totally managed by the Cloud service provider e.g. Yahoo, Google etc. on virtual machines, which brought out of a new transition known as virtualization[31]. Cloud computing is the virtualization of the computer programs through an internet connection rather than installing application/s on every computer. Due to the wide use of virtualization in implementing Cloud infrastructure brings security concerns for the Cloud services. There are various important security issues, which are considered while using virtualization for Cloud computing. Security concerns such as undetected network attacks, allocating and de-allocating resources and Virtual Machine (VM) hypervisor have been seen. Likewise virtualization, there are a number of various Cloud aspects associated with Cloud computing. Cloud issues can be grouped into various dimensions such as Cloud security including privacy, compliance, and legal issues. Security processes that were once visible are now concealed behind levels of abstraction. This lack of visibility creates a number of Cloud Security issues. The focus is to identify issues in Cloud computing, which considers vulnerabilities, threats, attacks and their countermeasures to provide security at each layer of Cloud computing. These issues along with others have been looked into and various countermeasures have been provided but Cloud needs to be more secure and robust to fulfil the daily needs of the clients. There is a need for development of a process that would help to analyze all high/medium/low risks and provide countermeasures for the same. There are various research contributions on the related areas, but there is an urgent need for the systematic review of the same. Cloud computing research deals with the advances and research in technical aspects of Cloud computing International Journal of Computer Science Engineering and Information Technology Research (IJCSEITR) ISSN 2249-6831 Vol. 3, Issue 3, Aug 2013, 305-314 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.