Cloud Environment Limitations and Challenges

Abstract

Cloud computing evolved as a huge paradigm in the information technology (IT) industry, which shifts the entire physical infrastructure onto the cloud environment, which gives flexibility, scalability, and on-demand provisioning of resources to the user requests. This paradigm reduces the up-front investment costs for the resources used in physical infrastructure. Apart from the advantages of a cloud environment, there are some limitations and challenges pertaining to security and a lack of control over the applications, which runs in a cloud environment. The main limitation of a cloud environment is that data are to be stored in a third-party environment. The user does not know about the standard of security to be maintained by the cloud provider, but there is a very minimal-level limitation in terms of security. Still there is a chance that a security breach will occur in the cloud environment, and the reason for that is because data are stored in the hands of a third-party cloud provider that lacks skilled employees in IT companies in relation to using the features of cloud environment services, the occurrence of denial-of-service attacks, the hijacking of cloud user accounts, and insecure APIs. These mentioned limitations pose new challenges for cloud providers that they need to address. This chapter covers all the limitations and challenges in the cloud environment in a detailed way.