In this paper, the authors discuss security issues for cloud computing and present a layered framework for secure clouds and then focus on two of the layers, i.e., the storage layer and the data layer. In particular, the authors discuss a scheme for secure third party publications of documents in a cloud. Next, the paper will converse secure federated query processing with map Reduce and Hadoop, and discusses the use of secure co-processors for cloud computing. Finally, the authors discuss XACML implementation for Hadoop and discuss their beliefs that building trusted applications from untrusted components will be a major aspect of secure cloud computing.