Cloud computing security auditing

In the recent era, cloud computing has evolved as a net centric, service oriented computing model. Consumers purchase computing resources as on-demand basis and get worry free with the underlying technologies used. Cloud computing model is composed of three service models Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and four deployment models Public, Private, Community and Hybrid. A third party service provider, stores & maintains data, application or infrastructure of Cloud user. Relinquishing the control over data and application poses challenges of security, performance, availability and privacy. Security issues in Cloud computing are most significant among all others. Information Technology (IT) auditing mechanisms and framework in cloud can play an important role in compliance of Cloud IT security policies. In this paper, we focus on cloud security audit mechanisms and models.