Adopting encryption to protect confidential data in public clouds: A review of solutions, implementation challenges and alternatives

A shift towards use of public cloud services is ongoing and more and more enterprises will start to use them in the near future. As public cloud services certainly promise to deliver many benefits, this new way of delivering services also introduces new types of risks. Due to the NSA’s surveillance programs, non-US enterprises need to reassess the risks of public cloud services provided by US companies and look for available solutions to protect their confidential data transferred and stored in the cloud. Encryption is seen as a solution to help enterprises full fill the requirements related to security and privacy, but is often challenging to implement. Encryption has its own security prob…