Serverless and NoSQL Databases in the Cloud: A Systematic Review of Security and Management Techniques

Cloud computing has shifted the paradigm of design of digital systems towards on-demand access to a scalable resource and encouraging fast innovation. Databases provide efficient data storage, retrieval, and management and are thus fundamental to these systems. Applications are becoming increasingly complex and data diverse, and traditional relational databases and monolithic architectures struggle to meet these demands. Serverless computing and NoSQL databases have emerged as important pillars of cloud-native systems in response and offer unmatched scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Serverless computing eliminates infrastructure management, enabling automatic code deployment and scaling, while NoSQL databases offer flexible, schema-less storage for large, unstructured data. Despite their benefits, both technologies pose security risks—serverless environments face issues like insecure APIs and limited runtime visibility, while NoSQL systems are prone to weak access controls and injection attacks. This review outlines the most critical vulnerabilities related to the two technologies and shows the most suitable mitigation measures, such as strong authentication, encryption, least privilege access, and continuous monitoring. It also covers the best practices of operations like performance optimization, autoscaling, data backup, and disaster recovery to build resilience and reliability of the systems. The study offers an in-depth overview of the effective serverless and NoSQL infrastructure protection and management by combining the knowledge of the latest research and real-world models. The results should help developers and organizations to create effective, resilient, and secure cloud-based systems that need to be developed according to the changing technology landscapes.