Security and Privacy Aspects of Cloud Computing: A Smart Campus Case Study

The trend of cloud computing is accelerating along with emerging technologies such as utility computing, grid computing, and distributed computing. Cloud computing is showing remarkable potential to provide flexible, cost-effective, and powerful resources across the internet, and is a driving force in today’s most prominent computing technologies. The cloud offers the means to remotely access and store data while virtual machines access data over a network resource. Furthermore, cloud computing plays a leading role in the fourth industrial revolution. Everyone uses the cloud daily life when accessing Dropbox, various Google services, and Microsoft Office 365. While there are many advantages in such an environment, security issues such as data privacy, data security, access control, cyber-attacks, and data availability, along with performance and reliability issues, exist. Efficient security and privacy measures should be implemented by cloud service providers to ensure the privacy, confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data services. However, cloud service providers have not been providing enough secure and reliable services to end users. Blockchain is a technology that is improving cloud computing. This revolutionary technology offers persuasive data integrity properties and is used to tackle security problems. This research presents a detailed analysis of privacy and security challenges in the cloud. We demonstrate the importance of security challenges in a case study in the context of smart campus security, which will encourage researchers to examine security issues in cloud computing in the future.