Abstract Cloud computing is one of the hot area of

computer science and networking. It is a style in which

scalable resources are provided to customers as a service.
There are three models of services SaaS (Software as a
service), PaaS (Platform as a service) and IaaS
(Infrastructure as a service). To benefit from these
services, we need high performance, secure, scalable
services. Cloud service providers must provide a high
performance of services in order to attract customers.
Cloud computing offers on demand and scalable access to
resources. Beside its advantages there are some drawbacks
of this paradigm. In this paper we will present the
challenges and issues of this paradigm.

I ndex Termsperformance, reliability, PasS, SaaS,
paradigm

I. INTRODUCTION
he idea of cloud computing has been proposed by
John McCarthy back in 1960, as; If
Computers of the kind I have advocated become the
computers of the future, then computing may someday
be organized as a public utility just as the telephone
system is a public utility. The computer utility could
become the basis of a new and important industry [4].
At that time it was not feasible to due to lack of
infrastructure. Salesforce was the first company to adopt
the concept of cloud computing in 1999. After that in
2002 Amazon offered Amazon web services (AWS).
The basic idea of cloud computing is to shift all the
computation and maintenance to cloud, hence giving the
customer a relief. Customers can access the services
using web browsers or thin client. Customers pay only
for resources and services that they actually use. In start
an agreement has been singed between service provider
and customer, in which resources and services are
customized according to the need of customer. That
agreement is called service level agreement (SLA).
While the customer does not have knowledge how
service provider uses infrastructure to support his needs.




There are three cloud models Software as a Service
(SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure
as a Service (IaaS). Each of them is briefly described
below:
SaaS is a model in which softwares are hosted by
service provider and those softwares are available to
customers over network.
PaaS provides a software platform on which users can
build their own applications and host them on the PaaS
providers infrastructure.
IaaS offers raw computing, storage, and network
infrastructure so that you can load our own software,
including operating systems and applications, on to this
infrastructure.


Fig. 1. Adoption of cloud computing

The organization of remaining paper is as follows.
Section 2 presents an overview of cloud computing, its
essential characteristics and service models. Section 3
describes the advantages and disadvantages of cloud.
Section 4 describes various issues and challenges of
cloud computing that are necessary to address in order
to adopt this technology. Finally, section 5 concludes
the papers.

II. CLOUD COMPUTING
To fully understand cloud computing, it is important to
know what are the characteristics of a system to be
Issues and Challenges of Cloud Computing
Emmad Zahid, Department of C &SE Bahria University Islamabad
emmad.zahid@gmail.com
T
called as cloud. In this section we will look more into
cloud computing definition and characteristics.

A. The Definition
There are numerous definition for cloud computing.
Some of the definitions are,
Buyya et al. defines, A Cloud is a type of parallel and
distributed system consisting of a collection of inter-
connected and virtualized computers that are
dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more
unified computing resource(s) based on service-level
agreements established through negotiation between the
service provider and consumers [4].
According to P. Gaw, The way I understand it, cloud
computing refers to the bigger picturebasically the
broad concept of using the internet to allow people to
access technology-enabled services. According to
Gartner, those services must be 'massively scalable' to
qualify as true 'cloud computing' [1].
The National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) defines, A model for enabling convenient, on-
demand network access to a shared pool of configurable
computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage,
applications, and services) that can be rapidly
provisioned and released with minimal management
effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model
promotes availability and is composed of five essential
characteristics, three service models, and four
deployment models [3].

B. Essential Characteristics
In order for a system to be called as cloud, there are
some essential characteristics. According to NIST, these
five essential characteristics can be classified as [2]:
On-demand self-service: A consumer can
access different services storage services,
software services etc. as needed automatically.
Internet: To avail the benefits of cloud
computing, internet with high bandwidth is the
backbone. All the services are available over
network
Resource pooling: The resources that can be
assigned to users can be processing, software,
storage, virtual machines and network
bandwidth. The resources are pooled to serve
the users requirement. The cloud gives an
impression of infinite resources.
Rapid elasticity: The beauty of cloud
computing is its elasticity. The resources
appear to users as indefinite and are also
accessible in any quantity at any time.
C. Service Models
The cloud services are delivered in three forms
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Software-as-a-
Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The
services are delivered over the network by using Web
browser. The service models are as follows:

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Its model in
which softwares are hosted by service
provider and those softwares are available to
customers over network.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Its a platform
on which users can build their own applications
and host them on the PaaS providers
infrastructure.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Its a
platform that offers raw computing, storage,
and network infrastructure so that you can load
our own software, including operating systems
and applications, on to this infrastructure.

III. ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES
Any computing paradigm is measured by its strength
and weakness. If the ratio of advantage over
disadvantage is high, then its acceptance rate is high.
Following are the main advantages and disadvantage of
cloud computing:
A. Advantages
Cloud computing offers many benefits and flexibility
to its users. Business can get free from the headache of
maintaining own servers and data. Some of the
advantages are given below:

Reduce first time investment cost.
Offer automatic software updates.
No more maintenance headache.
Provides on demand flexible, scalable services.
Consistent availability of data.
B. Disadvantages
We cant say that cloud computing does not have any
disadvantages. With many advantages there are some
critical disadvantages that are given below:

Require high speed network and high bandwidth
Privacy and security of data is not up to the mark
Data recovery can be issue if data is lost.
IV. ISSUES AND CHALLENGES
The existing computing paradigms, distributed
computing, SOA, networking etc. are building blocks of
cloud computing. There are numerous issues associated
with theses computing paradigms and some new
challenges emerged from cloud computing are required
to be addressed. The issues can be organized into
several different categories like security, performance,
reliability, scalability etc. Some of the issues are:
A. Security and Privacy
According to the survey of International Data
Corporation (IDC), Security, Performance and
Availability are the three biggest issues in cloud
adoption [1].As the data of user is totally deployed on
cloud; it has become more vulnerable to attacks. The
security threats are of two types internal and external.
External is the one in which a third person tries to
access the information. Internal threat is posed by the
employees or person who has access to data. Cloud
computing also poses privacy concerns because service
providers may accidently change the data which will be
disastrous for a business.
B. Performance
Performance is the second biggest obstacle in adoption
of cloud computing. Performance is normally presumed
by user in the form of response time [3]. Poor
performance can be caused by lack of resources, low
memory, low disk space etc. Poor performance may
lead to losing customers and thus leads to low revenue.
C. Reliability and Availability
The core strength of any system is reliability and
availability. Reliability denotes how often services are
available without disruption and how often they fail.
One of the important aspect that creates serious
problems for the reliability of cloud computing is down
time. One way to achieve reliability is redundant
resource utilization. Availability can be understood as
the possibility of obtaining the resources whenever they
are needed with the consideration to the time it takes for
these resources to be provisioned. Regardless of
employing architectures having attributes for high
reliability and availability, the services in cloud
computing can experience denial of service attacks,
performance slowdowns, equipment outages and natural
disasters. Amazon EC2 faced outage of resources back
in 2012. In order to remove FUDD (fear, uncertainty,
doubt, and disinformation), probably the reliability,
availability and security are the important and prime
concern to an organization [4].

D. Scalability and Elasticity
Scalability and elasticity are the most amazing and
unique features of the cloud computing. These features
provide users to use cloud resources as per their needs.
Scalability can be defined as the ability of the system to
meet increasing workload requirement by adding more
resources. Scalability can be provided in two ways-
horizontally and vertically. Horizontal scalability refers
to addition of more resources to a single node. To
achieve the maximum performance one cannot only rely
on hardware, because hardware has its own limitations.
For that we have there is other type of scalability-
vertical scalability. Vertical scalability refers to addition
of more nodes.



Fig. 2. Basic horizontal scalability


Fig. 3. Vertical scalability

V. CONCLUSION
Cloud computing is the future target for business. It is
expected to bring more changes in IT industry. There
are many benefits for business like low up-front cost,
low IT staff, no headache of maintaining own servers
etc. Although cloud computing has many benefits but
due to some major issues and challenges, the business
are hesitating to move their data to cloud. If the
challenges and issues discussed in this paper get
resolved properly, then no other issue can hold cloud
computing from growing exponentially.

VI. REFERENCES
[1] Y. Ghanam, J. Ferreira and F. Maurer, Emerging
issues & challenges in Cloud- A hybrid approach,
Journal of software engineering and applications, vol. 5,
no. 11, pp. 923-937, November 2012.
[2] M. A. Vouk, Cloud computing Issues, research
and implementations, Journal of computing and
information technology, Vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 235-246,
June- 2008.
[3] T. Dillon, Cloud computing: Issues and
challenges, 24th IEEE International Conference on
Advanced Information Networking and Applications.
pp. 27-33, 2010.
[4] Muhammad Sajid, Cloud Computing: Issues &
Challenges, International Conference on Cloud, Big
Data and Trust 2013, Nov 13-15, RGPV