Forensic investigation of cloud computing systems
Cloud computing platforms can (in theory) scale infinitely, with the addition of more hardware units bringing more resources to the system. However, despite the many benefits of cloud architecture, the effect of the virtualised model has broad similarities to centralised mainframe architecture -software and its data is held and managed remotely from its users, only accessible via that particular cloud's software, platform or infrastructure.
Exposure to threats
Cloud computing involves potentially greater exposure to security threats and privacy breaches, especially when the cloud is based on the Internet rather than an organisation's own internal network. For example, it might be unclear as to where data is processed within a cloud computing system, and such processing can occur in differing jurisdictions. Current commercial cloud service providers include Microsoft Azure Services Platform, Amazon Web Services and Google, as well as open source cloud systems such as Sun Open Cloud Platform. There are three typical cloud service delivery models: โข The Software as a Service (SaaS) model where the customer rents software for use on a subscription or payper-use model. โข The Platform as a Service (PaaS) model
where the customer rents a development environment for application developers.
โข The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model where the customer rents the hardware infrastructure on a subscription or pay-per-use model, and the service can be scaled depending upon demand. The nature of cloud computing services means that, in practice, an organisation may not know where data for which it is responsible is geographically located at any particular time. Some public cloud service providers do provide regional data storage options -for example, US and EU data storage options. However, data may be replicated by some cloud providers, so multiple sources may exist. In addition the cloud provider should know where virtual machine instances are running and have a historical record.