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By offering high availability and elastic access to resources, third-party cloud infrastructures such as Amazon EC2 are revolutionizing the way today's businesses operate. Unfortunately, taking advantage of their benefits requires businesses to accept a number of serious risks to data security. Factors such as software bugs, operator errors and external attacks can all compromise the confidentiality of sensitive application data on external clouds, by making them vulnerable to unauthorized access by malicious parties.
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Puttaswamy et al. (2011) studied this question.