Impact of coronavirus pandemic crisis on technologies and cloud computing applications

Abstract

In light of the COVID-19 outbreak caused by the novel coronavirus, companies and institutions have instructed their employees to work from home as a precautionary measure to reduce the risk of contagion. Employees, however, have been exposed to different security risks because of working from home. Moreover, the rapid global spread of COVID-19 has increased the volume of data generated from various sources. Working from home depends mainly on cloud computing (CC) applications that help employees to efficiently accomplish their tasks. The cloud computing environment (CCE) is an unsung hero in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. It consists of the fast-paced practices for services that reflect the trend of rapidly deployable applications for maintaining data. Despite the increase in the use of CC applications, there is an ongoing research challenge in the domains of CCE concerning data, guaranteeing security, and the availability of CC applications. This paper, to the best of our knowledge, is the first paper that thoroughly explains the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on CCE. Additionally, this paper also highlights the security risks of working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cloud-Based Zero Trust Access Control Policy: An Approach to Support Work-From-Home Driven by COVID-19 Pandemic

“…In light of the coronavirus pandemic, telecommuting becomes a necessity for enterprises worldwide. Shifting to work-from-home has instituted by employees across the globe [ 1 ]. The cloud computing environment (CCE) is the primary choice for the employees for accomplishing the task in work-from-home culture.…”

“…Over the last decades, dependencies on cloud resources have been increased significantly in organizations [ 1 ]. The businesses have been transformed enormously with leading cloud vendors like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google [ 2 ].…”

“…When these cloud resources are accessed from heterogeneous platforms using untrusted home networks, it leads to severe security breaches. These problems cannot be averted with the existing methods in the present dynamic situation, whereas the individual network traffic comes from the untrusted zone beyond the corporate structure [ 1 ]. Using this privilege, attackers and hacktivists compromise the critical cloud infrastructures by launching several attacks by spoofing the host.…”

“…When the number of hosts increases to use cloud resources from several remote zones, the chances of spoofing would be accelerated with the significant number of traffic packets. Spoofing associated with the vast amount of heterogeneous traffic coming from untrusted areas to the enterprise’s network can be prevented, which increases security [ 1 ].…”

A Study of Cloud Computing Adoption in Universities as a Guideline to Cloud Migration

“…In this period, they have been temporarily closed, had to interrupt their face-to-face education, had switched classes to online learning, and had canceled trips including activities such as conferences. It can be said that dependence on cloud computing applications has increased significantly, especially during the COVID-19 outbreak (Alashhab et al, 2020). To prevent the spread of the disease in the COVID-19 epidemic, many education sectors and universities switched to online learning environments (Chaka, 2020;Chen et al, 2020).…”