Cloud computing is the latest technology used widely across the computing world and has gained more popularity these days in terms of cost and time saving factors. There are different clouds that can be used by the clients and even the service providers are striving a lot to create new opportunities towards the cloud services and among the cloud types, private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds are the important ones. In general the private clouds are dedicated clouds and can be used by a single or more organizations together and get benefited with the service provided by the cloud providers.
Public clouds are public in nature and can be accessed by any end users, where the hybrid clouds are the integration components of public and private clouds and combine the application and data layer together. Thus cloud computing offers many public and private services to the clients and there should be a perfect level of clients and the cloud service providers in this context to make the cloud utilization to the top extent. There are many service providers for the cloud computing services and the key among them are Amazon and Google and they are successful in gaining more number of customers in terms of public and private clouds as well.
Apart from the wide range of clouds services and their corresponding advantages, there are few limitations attached with the cloud computing services. Security can be considered as the key risk associated with the cloud computing services and the level of security provided by the service providers is varying as per the external and internal threats of the clients and there is no perfect security solution and model for the cloud computing services as of now.
Among these security threats, data security is the key issue to be considered on its top extent, as the data of the most of the organizations is maintained across the remote location and this process is accomplished by the service providers and in this context the clients can’t trust the service providers all the time. Providing the security to the client’s data is not an easy task and need lot of time and revenue and thus most of the small organizations don’t prefer the cloud services due to lack of trust on the service providers and the third parities against their organizational data.
There are many efforts driven towards building trust for the small organizations towards the cloud computing and the corresponding data protection and still there are many confusions towards the data protection of the clients. The main aim of this project is to do the research by considering few small companies and understand their perspective towards the existing security issues against the organizational data and evaluate their role in creating a safe environment. To execute this research, five small software organizations in UK are considered.
These companies are using the cloud services and have some issues with the security against their data and the research is done at their site to understand the level of impact on their overall business value and process due to the security for their data. Few respondents are identified for all the companies considered and the network administrators and business development managers and a separate questionnaire is prepared for both the types of respondents and the key findings from the interview process are as given below.
All the research questions identified in the introduction chapter are answered in this chapter and as given below