Security, Privacy, and Digital Forensics in the Cloud

9Security‐as‐a‐Service (SECaaS) in the Cloud

Saman Taghavi Zargar¹, Hassan Takabi², and Jay Iyer¹

¹Office of CTO Security Business Group, Cisco Systems, San Jose, CA, USA

²Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

9.1 Introduction

Cloud computing has gained extensive interest within both academic and industry communities. It tries to consolidate the economic utility model with the evolutionary development of many existing approaches and computing technologies including distributed services, applications, and information infrastructures consisting of pools of computers, networks, and storage resources (Cloud Security Alliance 2009). Confusion exists in information technology (IT) communities about how the Cloud is different from existing models and how these differences might affect its adoption. Some see the Cloud as a novel technical revolution while others consider it a natural evolution of technology, economy, and culture (Cloud Security Alliance 2009). Nevertheless, cloud computing is a very important paradigm that provides tremendous potential for significant cost reduction through optimization and the increased operating and economic efficiencies in computing (Cloud Security Alliance 2009; Mell and Grance 2009). Furthermore, cloud computing has the potential to significantly enhance collaboration, agility, and scale, thus enabling a truly global computing model over the internet infrastructure.

While several researchers ...