The Rise of Cloud Computing: Data Protection, Privacy, and Open Research Challenges—A Systematic Literature Review (SLR)

Cloud computing is a long-standing dream of computing as a utility, where users can store their data remotely in the cloud to enjoy on-demand services and high-quality applications from a shared pool of configurable computing resources. Thus, the privacy and security of data are of utmost importance to all of its users regardless of the nature of the data being stored. In cloud computing environments, it is especially critical because data is stored in various locations, even around the world, and users do not have any physical access to their sensitive data. Therefore, we need certain data protection techniques to protect the sensitive data that is outsourced over the cloud. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) to illustrate all the data protection techniques that protect sensitive data outsourced over cloud storage. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to synthesize, classify, and identify important studies in the field of study. Accordingly, an evidence-based approach is used in this study. Preliminary results are based on answers to four research questions. Out of 493 research articles, 52 studies were selected. 52 papers use different data protection techniques, which can be divided into two main categories, namely noncryptographic techniques and cryptographic techniques. Noncryptographic techniques consist of data splitting, data anonymization, and steganographic techniques, whereas cryptographic techniques consist of encryption, searchable encryption, homomorphic encryption, and signcryption. In this work, we compare all of these techniques in terms of data protection accuracy, overhead, and operations on masked data. Finally, we discuss the future research challenges facing the implementation of these techniques.