The emergence of cloud computing has changed perception of all regarding software delivery, development models and infrastructure. Cloud computing has a potential of providing elastic, easily manageable, powerful and cost effective solutions. The rapid transition to cloud computing has fueled concerns on the security issues. The migration of the user’s data and applications in a shared environment of a cloud, where there is a collocation of several users increases security related concerns. Several research efforts have been made in evaluating challenges related to security faced by the cloud computing environments, a number of solutions of such problems have also been proposed. Integrated security solutions should be devised to deal with the increasing security risks. In this paper, a detailed cloud computing survey, key services and concepts are being presented.  This paper attempts to evaluate various security threats to cloud computing and a number of security solutions have also been discussed. Furthermore, a brief view of the cloud security regulatory bodies and compliance have also been presented. Despite the research efforts in cloud security field, there are still some open research problems and challenges which are discussed in this paper.

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Creating, supporting, and administering online laboratory experiences has become important in the pedagogy of learning environments for online networking courses. A case study is presented for an online laboratory environment used in a fundamental network security course that covers the competencies of the CompTIA Security+ certification. The online lab environment consists of virtual machines connected in an isolated virtual network managed by VMware vCloud Director. This online laboratory environment is used for both online and face-to-face lecture courses offered during the same semester. The emphasis in this case study is the support provided to the students and the continuous improvement cycle used by instructors to improve the educational experience. Challenges facing the students include both problems with the technical aspects of the virtual environment (e.g. corrupted virtual machine files, virtual environment slowdown due to heavy loads, or excess resource consumption by misconfigured virtual machines), and questions about the academic material being taught (e.g. why an error message is being given after a specific instruction). Several methods are used to provide support to the students including discussion boards, online video conferencing, announcements and instructions provided via the learning management system, individual emails, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings. Each of these methods of communication will be examined and feedback from students via a survey will be presented. The challenges of keeping laboratory exercises working and up-to-date will be examined and a list of suggested best practices for providing online support for students will be given.