Benefits, Threats and Attacks on Cloud Computing

Economical

• Infrastructure cost is greatly reduced.

• Less maintenance cost

• Less cost of ownership

• Fewer capital Expenses

Operational

• Flexibility

• Resiliency

• Efficiency

• Backup and disaster recovery

• Automatic updates

• Scalable

• Quick application deployment

Staffing

• Less Staffing required

• Less personal training

• Sharing of resources

Security

• Automatic patch application and updates.

• Less cost on security configurations.

• Swift responses received on security breaches.

• Better disaster recovery.

• Audit and monitoring did on provider’s side.

• Better management of security systems.

Threats and attacks on cloud

• Deletion without a backup

• Data Breach

• Hardware failures

• Natural disasters

• Authentication attacks

• VM level attacks

• Malicious insiders

• Unknown risk profile

• Vulnerable co-existents

• Compliance risks

• E-discovery is difficult across cross-borders.

• Loss of the encoding key

• Unauthorized access

• Account, Service & Traffic Hijacking

• Man-in-the-middle attacks

• Denial-of-service attacks.

• Cloud service provider may go out of business.

• Cloud service provider may decide to hold the data as a hostage if there is a dispute.

• Need to ensure that its private data is stored separately from others. If another client is the victim of a hack attack, it might affect the availability or integrity of the data of other companies located in the same environment.

• Data transfer across borders makes the laws to be applied even more complicated and consequently resulting in the private information to be even more vulnerable.

• SQL injection attacks allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to a database.

• Cross Site Scripting (XSS)

• Cryptanalysis attacks

• Side channel attacks

• Social engineering attacks

• DNS attacks