Abstract
According to a Forbes’ report published in 2015, cloud-based security spending is expected to increase by 42%. According to another research, the IT security expenditure had increased to 79.1% by 2015, showing an increase of more than 10% each year. International Data Corporation (IDC) in 2011 showed that 74.6% of enterprise customers ranked security as a major challenge. This paper summarizes a number of peer-reviewed articles on security threats in cloud computing and the preventive methods. The objective of our research is to understand the cloud components, security issues, and risks, along with emerging solutions that may potentially mitigate the vulnerabilities in the cloud. It is a commonly accepted fact that since 2008, cloud is a viable hosting platform; however, the perception with respect to security in the cloud is that it needs significant improvements to realise higher rates of adaption in the enterprise scale. As identified by another research, many of the issues confronting the cloud computing need to be resolved urgently. The industry has made significant advances in combatting threats to cloud computing, but there is more to be done to achieve a level of maturity that currently exists with traditional/on-premise hosting.