In cloud computing the sensitive data sharing is done within the secure groups. Here, privacy and security of the group sharing data have become the two major issues whereas, secure and reliable group communication is a fertile research area that has gained a wide popularity in group-oriented and collaborative applications. In this paper, a ternary tree-based TGDH secure group sharing protocol is proposed. This approach is more efficient than the binary tree approach in members’ strength of subgroup and the height of binary trees. Similarly, computation and communication cost also increases when the number of members of a group increases proportionally. Furthermore, to show the strength of proposed framework the statistical comparison with existing TGDH protocol is shown in this paper. Finally, the extensive simulation results with CloudSim tool are shown to demonstrate the resource utilisation by each member, VM allocation, cloudlets allocation and execution time of proposed construction. Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.