Abstract

Cloud computing provides individuals and organizations affordable access to various resources such as storage, servers, computing power, and software among others. The growing use of this decentralized approach presents many opportunities for cost and process optimization but at the same time it brings new challenges and barriers when it comes to solving crimes in the digital realm. For example, the cloud provides redundancy by making multiple copies of the data at various locations across the world. There are currently a lot of discussions regarding the ownership of the data on the cloud and jurisdiction issues because of the decentralized redundancy. So, when a crime occurs and data on the cloud is compromised, this brings up the problem of digital forensic investigations on third party networks and resources. While technology is progressing incredibly fast, policy makers tend to lag behind and not provide law enforcement with the necessary tools to solve some of these new 21st century crimes. The current paper provides an overview of some of the major challenges and barriers to digital forensic investigations involving the cloud. It offers recommendations for overcoming them and discusses directions for future research.

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