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| Open Access | Integrated Security Architectures For Cloud‑Enabled Business Transformation: A Comprehensive Review Of Zero‑Trust, Identity Management, Load‑Balancing, And Ddos Resilience In Cloud Environments
Dr. Rahul Mehta , Global Institute of Technology, London, UKAbstract
The accelerating adoption of cloud computing for business transformation presents organizations with a complex array of security challenges. As enterprises migrate critical workloads to cloud environments, they confront not only traditional threats such as Distributed Denial‑of‑Service (DDoS) attacks and data storage vulnerabilities, but also increased attack surfaces brought by microservices architectures, scalable load balancing, and dynamic identity and access management (IAM). This paper presents an integrative, theoretically grounded synthesis of existing research on cloud security, weaving together three often‑disparate domains: zero‑trust architectures (ZTA), IAM, and adaptive load‑balancing as a resilience mechanism against availability and performance threats. Drawing on seminal and recent contributions—including studies on DDoS defense in cloud contexts (Agrawal & Tapaswi, 2019), the security implications of cloud migration (Shitta‑Bey & Adewole, 2023), nature‑inspired load balancing strategies (Milan et al., 2019), and burgeoning literature on zero‑trust deployment in microservices (Kesarpu, 2025; Hosney et al., 2022; Che & Sheng, 2023; Hong et al., 2023)—the paper delivers a multi-layered conceptual framework aimed at securing cloud‑enabled business operations. The results highlight that pure cloud migration without systematically integrating ZTA and IAM leaves enterprises exposed to data breaches and service disruptions. Similarly, conventional load‑balancing algorithms, when not aligned with dynamic identity and access control policies, may inadvertently magnify security vulnerabilities. The discussion outlines challenges, potential trade‑offs among performance, flexibility, and security, and proposes a unified security architecture that balances resilience, access control, and scalability. Finally, the paper identifies gaps in empirical evaluation, advocating for future research on real‑world deployments and automated orchestration of security controls.
Keywords
Cloud security, Zero‑Trust Architecture, Identity Access Management
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