Security, Privacy, and Digital Forensics in the Cloud

8Cloud Auditing and Compliance¹

Paolina Centonze

Iona College, New Rochelle, NY, USA

8.1 Introduction

The global cloud computing market is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2024. This is based on the latest research report covering cloud computing products, technologies, and services for the global market by Market Research Media (https://www.marketresearchmedia.com/?p=839).

Companies, industries, and agencies, such as financial services organizations, health organizations, and government agencies, are looking into new cloud‐based auditing research and methodologies to alleviate security, privacy, trust, and forensics challenges.

The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 8.2 discusses the major cloud security problems and explains how auditing can alleviate these issues. Section 8.3 presents the state of the art of cloud auditing and discusses modifications and extensions needed in order to minimize cloud security challenges. Section 8.4 focuses on cloud compliance challenges and describes how national and international organizations are extending and modifying these compliance regulations in order to make them standardized. Section 8.5 discusses future research directions for cloud audits and compliance. Finally, Section 8.6 summarizes the main points and concludes this chapter.

8.2 Background

There is no doubt that cloud computing offerings are completely transforming ways of delivering and investing for IT services, which enable companies, industries, ...