Remote Data Auditing and How it May Affect the Chain of Custody in a Cloud Environment

As big data collection continues to grow, more and more organizations are relying on outsourcing their data to cloud-based environments. This includes the federal government and several agencies that depend on maintaining our citizens' secure data. Law enforcement agencies from the national level down to large city police departments are also using the cloud environment to store data. These agencies see this as a method of securing data while saving money by not maintaining the large data centers required to house this information. This data solution presents in own set of problems in that the outsourced data can become untrustworthy due to the lack of control of the data owners. Cloud computing is facing many difficulties, with security being the primary issue. This is because the cloud computing service provider is a separate entity; any data stored in the cloud can be interpreted as giving up control of the data by the primary data owner. [1] Remote data auditing (RDA) is increasingly important when managing data in a cloud environment, especially when organizations have to store their data in a multi-cloud environment. The challenging security threats posed by attempting to maintain the integrity of the data for proper auditing is a trial that was never addressed in the past.