Chapter 9: Data Mining Techniques for Information Assurance and Data Integrity on the Cloud

Security threats to information systems become more persistent and sophisticated. This trend is reflected by increasing costs of cybercrimes for business and government alike. Information assurance is an integral part of an organization’s cyber security. Growing dependence of organizations on cloud storage and computing services raises new threats to data integrity. In the cloud, your data are distributed over networked storage, communication, and computing devices provided by a third party. Although cloud providers may have a strong incentive for keeping the integrity of your data in order to maintain trust, an organization should be able to independently monitor the integrity of its data. In this chapter, a new approach to information assurance and data integrity on the cloud is proposed. The cloud resources and the resources of the organization are modeled together as a network. This joint network is monitored via the information exchange between trusted nodes. Statistical inference is combined with network analyses to support the decision-making related to information assurance. In many application domains, including energy and finance, an organization’s data are examples of big data. Therefore, the chapter discusses the potential for the proposed approach to be applied on such data and be utilized for applications other than cloud computing.