Cloud workflow and security: A survey

The cloud revolution has helped enterprises to improve their business and performance by providing them computing power, storage capabilities and a variety of services for very less or no infrastructure and reasonable cost. It also provisioned the scientific and academic communities to run complex applications involving large data sets, high performance or distributed resources. The Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) help the enterprises in automation of their business processes and thus help the management to take critical decisions fast. Cloud Workflows club the advantages of both Cloud Computing and WfMSs. In spite of the advantages of the cloud, security is a major area of concern. The use of WfMSs for critical and strategic applications, which is common in case of Business and Scientific community, gives rise to major concerns regarding the threats against integrity, authorization, availability etc. The concept of running secure workflow instances on public cloud processing platforms is still in its infancy. This paper gives an overview of workflow management systems, cloud computing, cloud workflows and security in these areas. This paper also provides a survey on security mechanisms for WfMSs and Cloud Workflows.