Requirements for Designing a New Cloud Security Framework

Cloud Computing, is simply an aggregation of computing resources, whereby the resources can be shared, and scaled based on the demands of the business. This is achieved through decoupling the underlying infrastructural requirements of hardware from business needs. This model implies that part of or entire IT infrastructure is outsourced to the outside vendor and the service provider provides these services over the internet. The architecture addresses most of the concerns namely cost, high availability, mobility, redundancy, and disaster recovery associated in maintaining an IT infrastructure. However, the issue of security is what is holding back the large adoption of this paradigm. Different security models are being implemented and some are under pipelines that are addressing this concern. But these security solutions are geared towards one side or another side of this structure. This paper highlights the current security issues and in-depth analysis of the requirements of the clients towards provider or vice-versa and thereafter, provides a background for a security model based on needs of side consuming the services. This analysis may help to develop a new cloud security framework at all levels of this architecture ranging from client side to the cloud provider side.