CLOUD COMPUTING SECURITY: CHALLENGES, THREATS, AND EMERGING PROTECTION STRATEGIES

Cloud computing has transformed the delivery of computing services by enabling organisations and individuals to access storage, applications, processing resources, and infrastructure over networks. Its scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency have encouraged adoption across healthcare, education, finance, government, and business. However, the distribution of data and services across remotely managed infrastructure introduces security and privacy challenges that require specialised protection strategies. Major concerns include unauthorised access, data breaches, insecure application interfaces, misconfiguration, account compromise, insider threats, insecure software dependencies, and service disruption. The complexity of cloud environments increases further when organisations use multiple providers or combine public and private infrastructure. This paper presents a narrative literature review of cloud computing security, focusing on common threat categories, architectural vulnerabilities, existing protection mechanisms, and emerging research directions. It examines identity and access management, encryption, network protection, security monitoring, secure software development, backup strategies, and the shared-responsibility model. Emerging approaches, including zero-trust architecture, confidential computing, automated cloud-security management, privacy-enhancing technologies, and artificial intelligence-assisted threat detection, are also discussed. The review highlights that no single security mechanism can address every cloud risk. Effective protection requires layered controls, continuous monitoring, secure configuration, tested recovery procedures, and clearly defined responsibilities between cloud providers and customers. The paper concludes that future cloud security research should prioritise interoperability, transparent security evaluation, privacy protection, and resilient architectures capable of responding to evolving threats.