Performance analysis of data fragmentation techniques on a cloud server

Abstract

The advancements in virtualisation and distributed computing have allowed the cloud paradigm to become very popular among users and resources. It allows companies to save costs on infrastructure and maintenance and to focus on the development of products. However, this fast-growing paradigm has brought along some concerns from users, such as the integrity and security of the data, particularly in environments where users rely entirely on providers to secure their data. This paper explores different techniques to fragment data on the cloud and prevent direct unauthorised access to the data. It explores their performance on a cloud instance, where the total time to perform the operation, including the upload and download of the data, is considered. Results from this experiment indicate that fragmentation algorithms show better performance compared to encryption. Moreover, when combining encryption with fragmentation, there is an increase in the security, with the trade-off of the performance.