Cloud Computing Security Challenges and Related Defensive Measures: A Survey and Taxonomy

Existing classification systems of cloud computing security challenges have mostly excluded human error as a major root cause of cloud security issues. Therefore, we propose a new cloud security challenge classification system by adding Human Error as a category and retaining the most relevant categories—Network, Data Access, and Virtualization—from previous research. Through a literature survey, we identified effective defensive measures that are used by experts to combat these security challenges and we provided a mapping of the challenges to their defensive measures. Our findings reveal that there is, indeed, a case for human error to be included as a category in the classification of the security challenges encountered in cloud computing, and if cloud service providers (CSPs) and their customers are fully informed on the security challenges encountered in the cloud, both parties can fully benefit from the advantages this model of computing offers.