Secure cloud infrastructure: A survey on issues, current solutions, and open challenges

Cloud computing is currently becoming a well-known buzzword in which business titans, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, among others, are at the forefront in developing and providing sophisticated cloud computing systems to their users in a cost-effective manner. Security is the biggest concern for cloud computing and is a major obstacle to users adopting cloud computing systems. Maintaining the security of cloud computing is important, especially for the infrastructure. Several research works have been conducted in the cloud infrastructure security area; however, some gaps have not been completely addressed, while new challenges continue to arise. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the security issues at different cloud infrastructure levels (e.g., application, network, host, and data). It investigates the most prominent issues that may affect the cloud computing business model with regard to infrastructure. It further discusses the current solutions proposed in the literature to mitigate the different security issues at each level. To assist in solving the issues, the challenges that are still unsolved are summarized. Based on the exploration of the current challenges, some cloud features such as flexibility, elasticity and the multi-tenancy are found to pose new challenges at each infrastructure level. More specifically, the multi-tenancy is found to have the most impact at all infrastructure levels, as it can lead to several security problems such as unavailability, abuse, data loss and privacy breach. This survey concludes by giving some recommendations for future research.