Design and Implementation of Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) for Cloud Computing

Abstract: Cloud computing technology has emerged to a great extent and people have realized the benefits of it. The commoditization of computing resources has become popular and there are many service providers available. As a new computing model, the cloud computing technology bestows plethora of benefits including the cost effective outsourcing of data. Cloud provides unlimited storage space without the need for capital investment in pay per use fashion. However, the data is stored in cloud servers that are treated as “untrusted”. This is because the cloud servers are accessed through Internet and they are remote in nature. There are many security concerns expressed by cloud users with respect to the protection of data. If every cloud user has to take responsibility of security of his data, it is not an easy job. At the same time if every cloud service provider has different security mechanisms for protecting data, it also implies reinventing the wheel. A common protection service can help masses (cloud users in abundance) to have protection as a service which is part of cloud computing. In this paper we attempt to realize such service which is based on the idea provided by Song et al. We built a prototype application that demonstrates the proof of concept. The empirical results revealed that the data protection as a service can dramatically reduce the pre-application deployment effort required in order to ensure the data of cloud users is protected.

Keywords: Cloud computing, data protection as a service, outsourcing