Towards securing cloud data in the multi-cloud scenario

Cloud computing has emerged to be the accepted computing model which provides services on-demand. The most used service layer is infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to outsource data to the cloud. With this service, organizations and individuals can avail of cloud services in pay as you use fashion instead of investing money for such infrastructure. Cloud provides many such benefits to its users. However, as the cloud servers are remote and assumed to be untrusted, users are worried about data security. Initially, a single cloud was used to store data. With the advancements in technologies and for reliability reasons, the concept of multi-cloud has emerged. The security and reliability issues with a single cloud can be overcome with multi-cloud systems. The rationale behind this is that a single cloud might have malicious insiders. When two or more clouds collaborate and provide services to end-users, it is expected to have more reliability and possible reduction in malicious insiders. This paper focuses on studying the potential security of data that is stored in multi-cloud. We built an algorithm and prototype application that demonstrates the concept of securing data in a multi-cloud environment. The empirical results revealed that the proposed system could ensure the data outsourced to cloud computing where a multi-cloud scenario prevails.