Many organizations demand efficient solutions to store and analyze huge amount of information. Cloud computing as an enabler provides scalable resources and significant economic benefits in the form of reduced operational costs. This paradigm raises a broad range of security and privacy issues that must be taken into consideration. Multi-tenancy, loss of control, and trust are key challenges in cloud computing environments. This paper reviews the existing technologies and a wide array of both earlier and state-ofthe-art projects on cloud security and privacy. We categorize the existing research according to the cloud reference architecture orchestration, resource control, physical resource, and cloud service management layers, in addition to reviewing the recent developments for enhancing the Apache Hadoop security as one of the most deployed big data infrastructures. We also outline the frontier research on privacy-preserving data-intensive applications in cloud computing such as privacy threat modeling and privacy enhancing solutions.