On cloud security requirements, threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures: A survey

The world is witnessing a phenomenal growth in the cloud enabled services and is expected to grow further with the improved technological innovations. However, the associated security and privacy challenges inhibit its widespread adoption, and therefore require further exploration. Researchers from academia, industry, and standards organizations have provided potential solutions to these challenges in the previously published studies. The narrative review presented in this survey, however, provides an integrationist end-to-end mapping of cloud security requirements, identified threats, known vulnerabilities, and recommended countermeasures, which seems to be not presented before at one place. Additionally, this study contributes towards identifying a unified taxonomy for security requirements, threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures to carry out the proposed end-to-end mapping. Further, it highlights security challenges in other related areas like trust based security models, cloud-enabled applications of Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.