Abstract
The concept of cloud computing can be traced back to almost the middle of last century. Cloud paradigm offers scalable, portable, platform-independent, ubiquitous, shared resilient, sustainable, and near-utility computing. The cloud computing is implemented as a software-only solution or based on advanced hardware supported virtualization technology. This paper presents the fundamental technology behind the cloud computing. Cloud computing posit as a utopia to solve multitudes of challenges of the current time. But in practice security is a major road block to its widespread adoption. This paper discusses the security issues of the cloud computing. Further the paper illustrates upon the security solutions for the virtualization and web services, two major enabling technologies of cloud computing. It also explains the novel concept of integrating the multi-level security in all of the cloud offerings in contrast to the security-as-a-service concept. Finally paper mentions the important guidelines for the development of service level agreements.