Towards Inclusive Privacy Protections in the Cloud

The adoption of cloud computing has created tremendous prospects and cost savings for a variety of organizations. Although increasing resources and effort have been devoted to fighting cyber-threats in cloud environments, cloud computing continues to be associated with a range of severe and complex security and privacy issues that may challenge the overall benefits that CSPs offer. While security protections in cloud computing has been widely discussed and comprehensive guidelines have been established, privacy protections in the cloud does not have the same level of focus or set of guideline or framework that has been established. In this paper, we present a systematic review of previous literature related to privacy issues in cloud computing, analyze multiple general privacy frameworks, policies, and principles to highlight the critical need for creating privacy protection criteria’s for cloud computing. Our research and review illustrates that privacy protections focused on cloud computing is deficient and it can serve as an initial guide towards building and improving privacy protections in order to meet cloud privacy requirements and ensure data protection.