Cloud Manufacturing: Security, Privacy, and Forensic Concerns

Cloud computing benefits from widespread adoption in every sector of our society and economy, due, at least in part, to the promise of cost-effective and elastic provisioning of computing resources. Manufacturing is one domain where cloud computing is starting to be seen as a promising solution to strengthen collaboration and cooperation capabilities, fostered by novel organization models and strategies. The combination of the cloud computing and manufacturing domains has brought the advent of "cloud manufacturing," which is rethinking the way manufacturing enterprises are organized and how they can realize the advantages of cloud computing in their operations. However, the full application of cloud manufacturing is hindered by several issues, of which security is one of the most challenging. This column presents an overview of the key security issues relating to cloud manufacturing and briefly surveys the state of the art on this topic.