To cloud or not to cloud: how risks and threats are affecting cloud adoption decisions

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to discover factors that are truly affecting cloud adoption decisions in organizations. Many reasons have been given for the adoption, or lack thereof, of the cloud. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses an empirical approach by means of an exploratory survey, using descriptive statistics and t-tests to determine significant differences among various response groups. Findings The findings reveal that current and prospective cloud users feel that public cloud computing is less secure than on premise systems. These users feel that the public cloud may still be currently too immature for mission-critical system deployments; however, they do expect it to be more secure in the future as the service models become more mature and better technologies become available. None of the cloud adoption risk factors were universally considered to be showstoppers with respect to adoption. Research limitations/implications The sample size is relatively small compared to the number of cloud participants. Additionally, respondents were concentrated in the high technology industries in Southern California. Originality/value The paper provides some valuable insight into cloud adoption and concludes that despite hyped security fears, the risks and threats of the cloud are well understood and that with proper planning and implementation, organizations can adopt cloud technologies with no additional risk.

A review on cloud based knowledge management in higher education institutions

“…Organizations can benefit from redundant pool of IT services. [28] A survey conducted by [29] to identify the expected benefits of cloud adoption and result as shown in Figure 3.…”

Security Challenges from Abuse of Cloud Service Threat

“…VM instances can also act as bots, by either getting infected from other customer's malware VMs, or due to deliberate installation of bot software by some malicious users [4]. The attacker would use these BotNets or BotCloud, typically, to send spam messages, spamdexing, spread viruses, worms, trojans, rootkit, spyware, backdoor, downloader, adware, ransomeware, http://journals.uob.edu.bh attack servers, mining bitcoins, DDoS attacks, access login details, cyber-attacks or other fraudulent activities [11].…”

“…Hypervisors allows multiple VMs to run on a single machine. If hypervisors is compromised, then VMs are likely to get infected and can bring whole cloud down [11,23,42]. b) Solution: A study [23] showed an attack as Hyperjacking, in where, an attacker creates and runs a thin hypervisors to take control over underlying operating system that would lead to have access and manipulate cloud users' data, allows eavesdropping or disrupt cloud services.…”

“…Cloud service providers can enhance their service offerings by standardizing and providing compatible APIs, data format and low cost data conversion during cloud implementation process, which in turn will provide support during service failovers and migration of data and systems when switching multiple cloud vendors platforms for backups [11].…”

“…According to Cloud Security Alliance [2][3][4], Abuse of cloud services has been identified as one of the top threats in cloud computing. Few other studies [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] have also identified the threat and its consequences. However, they have only conferred about the importance of implementing mitigation techniques for the identified threat, but no standard methods have been suggested.…”