Cloud computing, with its estimated market size of 150 billion USD annual turnover, is one of the major growth areas in information and communication technologies today. As a paradigm building on outsourcing of storage and processing, cloud computing suffers from intrinsic security and privacy problems. However, cryptographic research has made substantial progress over the last years and today provides a portfolio of mature cryptographic primitives and protocols suitable for addressing several of these problems in an effective and efficient way. Nevertheless, today’s reality shows that there exists a gap between what is possible and what is actually available in the cloud. We will present a detailed analysis of inhibitors and roadblocks standing in the way of an extensive deployment of cryptographic protection to cloud services, and how organizational and procedural measures may support the practical deployment of cryptography. We conclude our article with an overview of novel cryptographic schemes and their potential for protection of end-user data during storage and processing in the cloud, once they will become widely available.