Cloud computing security taxonomy: From an atomistic to a holistic view

Countless discussions around security challenges affecting cloud computing are often large textual accounts, which can be cumbersome to read and prone to misinterpretation. The growing reliance on cloud computing means that not only should we focus on evaluating its security challenges but devote greater attention towards how challenges are viewed and communicated. With many cloud computing implementations in use and a growing evolution of the cloud paradigm (including fog, edge and cloudlets), comprehending, correlating and classifying diverse perspectives to security challenges increasingly becomes critical. Current classifications are only suited for limited use; both as effective tools for research and countermeasures design. The taxonomic approach has been used as a modeling technique towards classifying concepts across many domains. This paper surveys multiple perspectives of cloud security challenges and systematically develops corresponding graphical taxonomy based upon meta-synthesis of important cloud security concepts in literature. The contributions and significance of this work are as follows: (1) a holistic view simplifies visualization for the reader by providing illustrative graphics of existing textual perspectives, highlighting entity relationships among cloud entities/players thereby exposing security areas at every layer of the cloud. (2) a holistic taxonomy that facilitates the design of enforcement or corrective countermeasures based upon the source or origin of a security incident. (3) a holistic taxonomy highlights security boundary and identifies apt areas to implement security countermeasures.