Cloud for IoT — A survey of technologies and security features of public cloud IoT solutions

All digital data that is produced nowadays is moving into the Cloud. Public Cloud providers offer unbeatable availability and redundancy of data in their servers, but the move to the Cloud is increasingly related to the associated services that it can provide. Internet of things devices are being deployed continuously with particular computing and storage constraints. This makes them perfect candidates for always being connected to the Cloud. Given the increasing importance of collected data, assuring end-to-end security between IoT devices and the Cloud is of paramount importance, with secure device authentication and encrypted communications as must-have features. This paper provides a comprehensive study of public Cloud IoT solutions in the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market. The focus is mainly on the security features, given that security is a weak spot in many IoT implementations. A comparison table was produced and the results show that popular standards are being used across providers for secure authentication and communications, while authorization is managed using diverse methods.