A SECURE CLOUD MIGRATION FRAMEWORK FOR SMES

Abstract

The benefits of cloud computing to enterprises, specifically, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have changed the ecosystem of international business throughout the world. It has now become much easier to have an IT infrastructure on the public cloud infrastructure, without having to invest in acquiring hardware build one. The physical hardware sharing, which is the key to the success of cloud platforms, also has security implications associated with it. The physical hardware sharing not just sparks concerns and insecurities amongst enterprises that migrate to the cloud platform about their data and services hosted on the platform, it also exposes them to security threats, such as; side- channel attacks from co-located virtual machines. The solutions available and quite often implemented are quite effective and do work to a certain extent, however, these solutions that claim to eradicate the problem completely, do not fulfil their claims completely. Additionally, the available solutions are not that effective when implemented individually. This dissertation proposes a secure cloud migration framework, which is specifically designed for SME, considering the phases they go through, 1