Benefits, Threats and Attacks on Cloud Computing

Economical

• Infrastructure cost is greatly reduced.




• Less maintenance cost




• Less cost of ownership




• Fewer capital Expenses

Operational

• Flexibility




• Resiliency




• Efficiency




• Backup and disaster recovery




• Automatic updates




• Scalable




• Quick application deployment

Staffing

• Less Staffing required




• Less personal training




• Sharing of resources

Security

• Automatic patch application and updates.




• Less cost on security configurations.




• Swift responses received on security breaches.




• Better disaster recovery.




• Audit and monitoring did on provider’s side.




• Better management of security systems.

Threats and attacks on cloud

• Deletion without a backup




• Data Breach




• Hardware failures




• Natural disasters




• Authentication attacks




• VM level attacks




• Malicious insiders




• Unknown risk profile




• Vulnerable co-existents




• Compliance risks




• E-discovery is difficult across cross-borders.




• Loss of the encoding key




• Unauthorized access




• Account, Service & Traffic Hijacking




• Man-in-the-middle attacks




• Denial-of-service attacks.




• Cloud service provider may go out of business.




• Cloud service provider may decide to hold the data as a hostage if there is a dispute.




• Need to ensure that its private data is stored separately from others. If another client is the victim of a hack attack, it might affect the availability or integrity of the data of other companies located in the same environment.




• Data transfer across borders makes the laws to be applied even more complicated and consequently resulting in the private information to be even more vulnerable.




• SQL injection attacks allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to a database.




• Cross Site Scripting (XSS)




• Cryptanalysis attacks




• Side channel attacks




• Social engineering attacks




• DNS attacks