These were some of the biggest names that have fallen victims to cloud-related security breaches in recent years. As more organisations join the ever-growing list of victims, many of such cyber threats are on-going and may remain undetected. For industries which are keen adopters of cloud technology, incidents of security breaches can be costly. Monetary loss aside, concerns over the organisation's reputation and consumer confidence are some of the aftermath issues that organisations will urgently need to address.

Nevertheless, the adoption of cloud-based solutions by organisations will only increase in the current digitisation-powered Industry 4.0 era. Driven by financial and espionage motives, the cloud, with its increasing mass of confidential data, thus represents an attractive target for hackers, who constantly modify their modes of attack to steal invaluable information.

Hence, threats to cloud platforms demand attention from both service providers and consumers of cloud technology. Solutions to tackle these threats are a major consideration for further applications of cloud technologies. Consequently, innovators are actively confronting these challenges head-on by pursuing new innovations to thwart the work of hackers and attackers. Given the pertinent need to understand innovative methods to ensure cloud safety, this report looks at worldwide patent applications relating to cloud security published in 2009-2018 with a particular focus on the areas of

1. identity and access management;
2. data security;
3. network security;
4. virtualisation security; and
5. security policy management,
    

to understand the current technologies in cloud security.