Securely terminating processes in a cloud computing environment

When terminating a process instantiated in a cloud, a cloud management system can provide and interact with an eraser agent on the computing systems supporting the process. The process can be any type of process that can exits in the cloud such a virtual machine, software appliance, or software instance. The eraser agent can execute on the computing systems to erase information stored on physical storage devices of the computing systems and associated with the process. In particular, the eraser agent can utilize secure algorithms to alter and obscure the information stored on the physical storage devices of the computing systems and associated with the process.