An empirical study of challenges in managing the security in cloud computing

Cloud computing is being heralded as an important trend in information technology throughout the world. Benefits for business and IT include reducing costs and increasing productivity. The downside is that many organizations are moving swiftly to the cloud without making sure that the information they put in the cloud is secure. The purpose of this paper is to learn from IT and IT security practitioners in the Indian Continent the current state of cloud computing security in their organizations and the most significant changes anticipated by respondents as computing resources migrate from on-premise to the cloud. As organizations grapple with how to create a secure cloud computing environment, we believe the findings from this study can provide guidance on how to address business and technology risks exacerbated by cloud computing. Specifically, in this paper cloud computing users evaluate security technologies and control practices they believe are best deployed either on-premise or in the cloud. Survey results are presented where we have asked cloud-computing users to rate the types of sensitive or confidential information too risky to be moved to the cloud. Alongside this paper also discusses the need of having SSL in the cloud to provide definitive way of securing the cloud.