Nowadays, many public and private institutions are inter- ested to benefit from the advantages of the Cloud Computing technol- ogy, especially when it comes to massive data storage. However, there is one issue related to security that impedes the widely adoption of this technology. Indeed, using cloud services for data storage implies that the clients must trust the Cloud provider with their data and even more critically losing full control on data. Nevertheless, there exists a solution to bypass this security issue that consists in securing data on the client’s premises, i.e. before it is sent to the Cloud provider for storage. One of the widely used security mechanism to this matter is data encryption. Encryption comes in two main schemes symmetric and asymmetric with a number of encryption algorithms for each scheme. Hence, relying on the data encryption mechanism the contribution of this work is three- fold. First of all, we propose a meta-model that represents the result of the study and the comparison of the state-of-the-art works. Thus, the meta-model can be used as a referential to instantiate different solutions to data security. Second, we use our meta-model to propose a novel ap- proach for securing data in a Cloud environment. The solution relies on security patterns that provide a customized data encryption. Finally, en- cryption has surely proven its security effectiveness but comes with some drawbacks. Indeed, encryption can be costly in time and induces perfor- mances’ overheads especially when it comes to encrypt massive amounts of data. Plus, these overheads are not without consequences on the envi- ronment and can increase the carbon footprint of servers. Therefore, we extend our meta-model to consider the impact of the encryption security mechanism on the environment. This extension is used to evaluate our proposed solution and to show its positive impact on the environment.