Security in the cloud: Understanding the risks of cloud-as-a-service

Cloud services are susceptible to faults, failures, and attacks just like enterprise IT architectures, the difference is that when a cloud suffers an outage it can affect numerous customers. But cloud security is not just about accessibility and availability; it must also provide information integrity and confidentiality to assure effective business operations. Therefore, cloud-based services (i.e. SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS) will also have to provide resilient and fault tolerant resources at the application, platform, and infrastructure levels in order to assure cloud consumer mission objectives can be met. This will require the development of a new breed of security technologies that not only provide Information Assurance but also Mission Assurance.