Considerations on Evaluation of Practical Cloud Data Protection

Abstract

With the continuous growth of enterprises’ digital transformation, business-driven cloud computing has seen tremendous growth. The security community has proposed a large body of technical mechanisms, operational processes, and practical solutions to achieve cloud security. In addition, diverse jurisdictions also present regulatory requirements on data protection to mitigate possible risks, for instance, unauthorized access, data leakage, sensitive information and privacy disclosure. In view of this, several practical standards, frameworks, and best practices in the industry are proposed to evaluate and improve the protection level of cloud data. However, few evaluation models can conduct a comprehensive quantitative evaluation for cloud data protection that includes security, privacy, and even ethical considerations. In this paper, we first make a comprehensive review of cloud data security and privacy issues, especially also including ethical concerns that we consider as a type of specific risks caused by human factors, which refers to acting honorably, honestly, justly, and legally, due diligence, and due care. Then, we propose a novel evaluation model for cloud data protection that can quantitatively assess the protection level. Finally, based on the parallel evaluation between manual assessment by experts and our evaluation model, results show that our evaluation model is consistent with the manual evaluation conclusion.