J Supercomput (2012) 61:337–352 DOI 10.1007/s11227-010-0460-9 Reference deployment models for eliminating user concerns on cloud security Gansen Zhao · Chunming Rong · Martin Gilje Jaatun · Frode Eika Sandnes Published online: 17 June 2010 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract Cloud computing has become a hot topic both in research and in industry, and when making decisions on deploying/adopting cloud computing related solu- tions, security has always been a major concern. This article summarizes security related issues in cloud computing and proposes five service deployment models to address these issues. The proposed models provide different security related features to address different requirements and scenarios and can serve as reference models for deployment. Keywords Cloud computing · Cloud security · Reference deployment model · Security concerns 1 Introduction Extensive research efforts have been put on cloud computing and its related technolo- gies, resulting in several well acknowledged cloud computing theories and technolo- gies. Cloud computing is a collection of technologies that allow IT resources to be virtualized, used on an on-demand basis and delivered via the Internet as services. G. Zhao ( ) School of Computer Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China e-mail: gzhao@scnu.edu.cn C. Rong Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway M.G. Jaatun Department of Software Engineering, Safety and Security, SINTEF ICT, Trondheim, Norway F.E. Sandnes Faculty of Engineering, Oslo University College, Oslo, Norway