In the technology world, if you haven’t heard of cloud computing, you must have been trapped in a cave for the past few years. Though the CEO of Oracle said that cloud computing “is [just] a computer attached to a network,” it has changed the landscape of computing forever.

However, even if everyone is using the cloud now, there is a vast difference between the degrees of adoption. Many users still hesitate to put all of their data in the cloud. Surveys of CTOs and CIOs reveal that they have a number of reservations about completely adopting cloud computing for their businesses because of security, privacy, and trust issues. Recent data breaches in many big companies exacerbate their concerns.

This book addresses these concerns. It consists of three parts: “Cloud Security,” “Cloud Privacy and Trust,” and “Case Studies: Cloud Security, Privacy, and Trust.” Each part has five papers written by different authors. However, the editors did not enforce a consistent writing style. For example, the reference styles, figure styles, and article lengths are different.

Cloud computing can be categorized into public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud. What worries people most is the public cloud, which is controlled by big-name companies. These big companies have their own policies for security, privacy, and trust and tend to be beyond the control or even comprehension of cloud users. Therefore, to ease their minds, methods implementable by these cloud users are necessary. Most of the papers in this book, however, are targeted to cloud service providers with the aim of enhancing security, privacy, and trust. They cannot be adopted by cloud service users. As a result, end-user concerns about adopting cloud computing remain.

Some papers in the book are surveys and some are more like research papers. The surveys are more useful and readable for users. Maybe including more surveys and fewer research articles is a better direction for books like this in the future.

I would have liked to see some subtitles in the table of contents. For example, the first paper has 42 pages. A single title, “Cloud Security: State of the Art,” cannot tell the whole story. Also, the quality of figures in the book needs to be improved. The font is not consistent, and the resolution is bad (for example, Figure 8 on page 231).

Finally, there are two other books I would recommend to readers who are interested in, and would like more information on, these cloud topics [1,2].