With the advantage of storage as a service many enterprises are moving their valuable data to the cloud, since it costs less, easily scalable and can be accessed from anywhere any time. The trust between cloud user and provider is paramount. We use security as a parameter to establish trust. Cryptography is one way of establishing trust. Searchable encryption is a cryptographic method to provide security. In literature many researchers have been working on developing efficient searchable encryption schemes. In this paper we explore some of the effective cryptographic techniques based on vector space model (VSM), which manages increased control complexity of the data centre, and a less efficient cloud storage system. © 2016, Institute of Integrative Omics and Applied Biotechnology. All right reserved.