A Survey on Modern Cloud Computing Security over Smart City Networks: Threats, Vulnerabilities, Consequences, Countermeasures, and Challenges

Cloud Computing (CC) is a promising technology due to its pervasive features, such as online storage, high scalability, and seamless accessibility, in that it plays an important role in reduction of the capital cost and workforce, which attracts organizations to conduct their businesses and financial activities over the cloud. Even though CC is a great innovation in the aspect of computing with ease of access, it also has some drawbacks. With the increase of cloud usage, security issues are proportional to the increase. To address these, there has been much work done in this domain, whereas research work considering the growing constrained applications provided by the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city networks are still lacking. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive security analysis of CC-enabled IoT and present state-of-the-art in the research area. Finally, future research work and possible areas of implementation and consideration are given to discuss open issues.