In a typical cloud computing diverse facilitating components like hardware, software, firmware,
networking, and services integrate to offer different computational facilities, while Internet or a private
network (or VPN) provides the required backbone to deliver the services. The security risks to the cloud
system delimit the benefits of cloud computing like “on-demand, customized resource availability and
performance management”. It is understood that current IT and enterprise security solutions are not
adequate to address the cloud security issues. This paper explores the challenges and issues of security
concerns of cloud computing through different standard and novel solutions. We propose analysis and
architecture for incorporating different security schemes, techniques and protocols for cloud computing,
particularly in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) systems. The proposed
architecture is generic in nature, not dependent on the type of cloud deployment, application agnostic and
is not coupled with the underlying backbone. This would facilitate to manage the cloud system more
effectively and provide the administrator to include the specific solution to counter the threat. We have also
shown using experimental data how a cloud service provider can estimate the charging based on the
security service it provides and security-related cost-benefit analysis can be estimated.