Secure cloud storage: available infrastructures and architectures review and evaluation

Cloud Computing is an emerging technology paradigm, enabling and facilitating the dynamic and versatile provision of computational resources and services. Even though the advantages offered by cloud computing are several, there still exists thoughts as per the thus offered security and privacy services. Transferring and storing data to a cloud computing infrastructure, provided by Storage-as-a-Service (STaS) tenants, changes an organization's security posture, as it is challenging to control or audit the cloud provider's infrastructure in terms of the way the underlying risks are controlled and mitigated. Therefore, it is necessary that the organizations understand the new threats and risks introduced by the cloud technology. On the other hand we need to adopt, develop, and deploy mechanisms that can effectively and efficiently preserve the confidentiality and integrity of the data. In this paper we examine available cloud computing architectures, focusing on their security capabilities regarding the storage of the data. We then define a set of comparative criteria, so as to evaluate these architectures. Finally, we evaluate current commercial secure storage services, in order to demonstrate their strengths and weaknesses as well as their supported features and usability.