  Secret sharing is a new alternative for outsourcing data in a secure way.It
avoids the need for time consuming encryption decryption process and also the
complexity involved in key management.The data must also be protected from
untrusted cloud service providers.Secret sharing based solution provides secure
information dispersal by making shares of the original data and distribute them
among different servers.Data from the threshold number of servers can be used
to reconstruct the original data.It is often impractical to distribute data
among large number of servers.We have to achieve a trade off between security
and efficiency.An optimal choice is to use a $(2,3)$ or $(2,4)$ threshold
secret sharing scheme, where the data are distributed as shares among three or
four servers and shares from any two can be used to construct the original
data.This provides both security,reliability and efficiency.We propose some
efficient and easy to implement secret sharing schemes in this regard based on
number theory and bitwise XOR.These schemes are also suitable for secure
sharing of images.Secret image sharing based on Shamir's schemes are lossy and
involves complicated Lagrange interpolation.So the proposed scheme can also be
effectively utilized for lossless sharing of secret images.
