Toward a Secure and Storage-Efficient Cloud Deduplication Framework for Multi-Tenant Environments

Cloud platforms increasingly store large volumes of repeated data generated through backup, synchronization, versioning, collaboration, and software-as-a-service workflows. In multi-tenant environments, duplicate content across users increases storage demand, input-output overhead, bandwidth consumption, and operational cost, while also raising challenges related to confidentiality, ownership assurance, metadata exposure, and tenant isolation. This paper addresses the need for a more integrated secure deduplication direction for multi-tenant cloud storage. A literature-grounded conceptual framework is proposed that combines adaptive deduplication, secure ownership verification, encrypted metadata management, and tier-aware storage optimization within a unified architecture. The paper synthesizes the prior work, identifies the major research gaps, and formulates the problem definition and research objectives that guide the proposed framework. The proposed framework is expected to support efficient storage reduction without weakening controlled access and multi-tenant security requirements. This work is relevant to enterprise cloud storage, backup systems, document repositories, and software-as-a-service platforms where repeated data and shared storage are common.