Outsourcing data to a third-party administrative control, as is done in cloud computing, gives rise to security concerns.
The data compromise may occur due to attacks by other users and nodes within the cloud. Therefore, high security measures are
required to protect data within the cloud. However, the employed security strategy must also take into account the optimization of
the data retrieval time. In this paper, we propose Division and Replication of Data in the Cloud for Optimal Performance and
Security (DROPS) that collectively approaches the security and performance issues. In the DROPS methodology, we divide a file
into fragments, and replicate the fragmented data over the cloud nodes. Each of the nodes stores only a single fragment of a
particular data file that ensures that even in case of a successful attack, no meaningful information is revealed to the attacker.
