Analyzing and Preventing Cybersecurity Attacks in Cloud Computing

School of Computing Postgraduate Programme

MSc in Information Systems

Analyzing and preventing Cybersecurity attacks and their performance in Cloud Computing

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List of Figures

Chapter 2: Literature Review

2.1 Overview

The internet has played a significant role in globalization, connecting people and industries for effective communication and to operate in a digital environment (Khan, 2019). The internet has paved the way for various services and innovations that have changed the way businesses, education, government, and healthcare interact; being the key driver of social evolution, many technologies have emerged with the help of the internet. Cloud computing is one such evolution that delivers different services. Sunyaev (2020) explained that cloud computing is the evolution of the dominant business model and information technology to deliver IT resources. With the help of cloud computing, organizations, irrespective of size and domain, and individuals can get on-demand network access for managing, developing, and storing IT resources. There are various benefits provided by the cloud. However, there are a series of challenges of cloud computing that makes it vulnerable to being attacked.

This chapter focuses on the comprehensive review of the research areas that are associated with cloud computing and the vulnerabilities of cloud computing that lead to cyberattacks, and the cybersecurity measures to address vulnerabilities. The review provides an overview of the evolution of cloud computing, the different cloud computing paradigms, the challenges faced by cloud computing, security challenges, architecture challenges, and other challenges. The measures used for preventing cyberattacks in cloud computing are discussed in this chapter.

2.2 Cloud computing paradigm and evolution of cloud computing

The idea of cloud computing is no more mystery. Being one of the frequently used terms in aspects of modern technology and digital transformation, cloud computing has become an integral part of everyday lives (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2017). Similar to clouds that collect water molecules, the term ‘cloud’ in terms of technological innovation in cloud computing is the collection of networks. The users are it individuals or organizations, irrespective of size or working domain, can use cloud computing boundlessly whenever there is any requirement. Cloud computing is distributed digital infrastructure that delivers a range of services through the internet (Marinescu, 2022). Cloud computing is known for delivering on-demand computing services.

These services range from processing power to applications and storage of data. Rather than owing the entire computing infrastructure, an individual or organization can rent or buy cloud space for storing their information and other IT resources. The person can access their stored information from anywhere and anytime, and the person only pays for the space they are using (Dang et al., 2019). The services provided by cloud computing ranges from basic storage to standards office applications, networking, and processing power, with the help of artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

2.2.1 Evolution of cloud computing

In the last decade, computing paradigms have evolved significantly. The paradigm that has evolved is the most consolidated one is for sure cloud computing (Agarwal et al., 2016). The paradigm of cloud computing was born from the concept of “computing as a utility”, which is known for allowing easy access to the development of new internet services (Nikhil et al., 2019) as explained by Srivastava & Khan (2018) that in 1960, Jon McCarthy in one of his speeches at MIT indicated that computing could be sold as per the utility, similar to electricity and water. That marked the initial step for computing, and in 1999, the Salesforce Company started operating through a convenient website to distribute the applications to the customer. Refer to figure 1 for the evolution of cloud computing. In 2002, Amazon Web Services started to provide the services of computation and storage. Around 2009, big giants like Oracle, HP, Microsoft, Google started to provide services of cloud computing. That marked the initial steps in the cloud computing evolution, and since then, every other person has used the services of cloud computing and become a basic necessity for IT industries.

Figure 1 Cloud Computing Evolution

(Source: Srivastava & Khan, 2018)

Surbiryala and Rong (2019) explained that in 2007 many universities of the US started collaborating with IBM and Google to promote cloud computing. This helps the universities to reduce the cost of academic research, and students are able to share resources among themselves. Cloud computing has evolved rapidly as compared to other traditional technologies, mapping with older technologies, cloud computing and paved its way from utility computing and grid computing to modern-day cloud computing. Around 1960, the cost of the processing or computing power was comparatively higher, and this challenge was addressed by introducing the idea of sharing computing resources. This allowed the people to share the computer resources, and the customer was liable to pay only for the service they used. This moved to grid computing, which solved the massive computing problems. Grid computing broke the problems into smaller problems that were solved with simple and low-performance computers and distributed the problems to various machines. This two computing were combined, and the concept of cloud computing emerged. Cloud computing was similar to utility and grid computing. Cloud computing has revolutionized the way businesses and individuals stores and access information (De Donno et al., 2019). Cloud computing simplified the development of software, business processes and industries, and individuals accessing services over the internet.

2.2.2 Cloud computing models

Cloud computing has been divided into two types of models that are further divided into different levels. Cloud computing as a deployment model is categorized into three types. These types of deployment models are public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud, refer to figure 2. As explained by Odun-Ayo et al. (2018), these models are as follows:

• Public Cloud: This is the type of deployment model that provides cloud services for the end-users and provides the pay-per-go feature. These kinds of clouds are accessible publicly to store and access clouds. The infrastructure is provided by the end-user.

• Private Cloud: This is the type of model used within an organization. This cloud is set to be used by the employees of the organization for organizational work. This cloud is beneficial for the organizations to store and access data specific to their organizations, and this is provided over the private network.

• Hybrid Cloud: This deployment model is the combination of both the clouds model, i.e., private and public cloud. The cloud resources are managed independently, and the customers use more than one model to meet the objectives of organizations and end-users (Rashid & Chaturvedi, 2019).

Cloud computing has been divided into three service models. These service models, as per their levels, are as follows: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), as presented in figure 3. As explained by Bokhari et al. (2018), these models have different functionalities, such as:

• Software as a Service (SaaS): This model provides the way of carrying application as a service over cloud computing. Instead of installing a particular software over the computer system, the users get web-based software that is accessed with an active internet connection. This makes used free from managing different software. The users can access software instead of buying them. For example, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and more.

• Platform as a Service (PaaS): In this service model, the users are provided with a development environment platform on which the users can deploy their software and codes. The users can construct their applications that run on the infrastructure of the service provider. For example, Google App Engine and Microsoft’s Azure.

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): In this service model, the users get complete computing infrastructures such as operating systems, networks, storage, and hardware on demand. The service of IaaS can be accessed with wide area networks (WAN). For example, a virtual machine can be created with the help of IaaS.

Figure 2 Cloud computing service model

(Source: Bokhari et al., 2018)

2.2.3 Cloud computing paradigm

Cloud computing is effective in distributing massive computational power that is accessible by all. The different organizations and businesses work on similar principles, and cloud computing allows organizations for moving their resources whenever they require more processing powers for the software instead of wasting the resources. There are common paradigms and characteristics such as advanced security for services, resilient computing, service-oriented, geographically distributed, virtualized, and large scalability (Massobrio et al., 2018). Apart from these characteristics, some of the major characteristics are as follows:

• On-demand self-service: The users of cloud services can use the computing resources as per the needs at any time period and do not require ant human or manual interference to start and stop the service.

• Network access: Cloud computing and its resources are generally delivered over the network and can be used for all types of applications and data from different sources to be stored (Diaby & Rad, 2017). The user can access cloud computing over any network or device, such as laptops, smartphones, and desktops.

• Resource Pooling: This is one of the significant characteristics of cloud computing. Cloud computing groups all its resources together for serving the end-users with multiple tenancy models. The end-users can access the resources irrespective of their location and network.

• Rapid elasticity: The consumers, be it organizations or individuals, can scale up their resources (Choi et al., 2018). Cloud computing is scalable and effective for businesses and easy to be implemented for managing the work.

Reference

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