Securing data in the network has been an important task since the intrusion of various attacks that attempts to corrupt or hack data for malicious purpose. Various security mechanisms have been proposed in the literature to secure data from an unauthenticated user. The popular methods includes symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic mechanism which use keys distributed among the owner and authenticated users to access data genuinely. This approach works well in an environment where the numbers of users are less and the file being accessed is small in size. It consumes significant amount of overhead to generate keys and distribution of the same to the users. In addition when the size of the file is large it consumes more space to hold the encrypted form of the data. Cloud being a large scale distributed system that contains more number of storage nodes and users requires an optimized mechanism to offer security to the users of data with minimized communication overhead and reduction in storage spaces required to hold the encrypted form of the data. In this paper we analyse various approaches proposed to provide efficient data access to the users of the cloud. We also mention the possible extensions of the proposed approaches as future work. © 2016, International Journal of Pharmacy and Technology. All rights reserved.