Protecting privacy in the cloud: current practices, future directions

peer-reviewedCloud computing has now emerged as popular computing paradigm for data storage and computation for enterprises and individuals. Its major characteristics include the pay-per-use pricing model, where users pay only for the resources they consume with no upfront cost for hardware/software infrastructures, and the capability of providing scalable and unlimited storage and computation resources to meet changing business needs of enterprises with minimal management overhead [1]. The cloud, however, presents a major limitation to enterprises and individuals who move to public clouds: they lose control over the systems that manage their data and applications, leading to increased security and privacy concerns [2,3,4]. In this article, we examine cloud privacy concerns, and provide an overview of current and emerging solutions for protecting privacy of data and applications deployed in the cloud. Based on this, we suggest a set of recommendations for practitioners and researchers to improve privacy protection of cloud users