Cloud Database Security Issues and Challenges: A Review

Abstract

Recently, cloud computing has been a heavily adopted technology by most businesses, simultaneously, the database has also shifted to the cloud computing environment. This paradigm called cloud database, and it can reduce data management costs and allow new business to focus on the delivered product. Moreover, cloud computing can be mean to solve scalability, flexibility, performance, availability and cost problems. However, security has been identified as a major threat to the cloud database, and it has played a critical role in cloud computing acceptance. Different aspects of security should be considered during the deployment of any cloud database management system. These aspects include abut are not limited to data confidentiality, data integrity, data availability, data privacy, data isolation, and the protection from insider attacks. In this paper, we address the state-of-the-art studies that considered such security challenges and issues facing the adoption of a cloud database. We also propose a conceptual model to summarize and provide a better understanding of these issues and their effect on cloud database. Furthermore, we investigate such issues according their relevant level and show two examples of vendors and the security feature that were practiced for the database on the cloud.  Finally, we summarize the open cloud databases security issues and recommend some future directions.