FEDERATED CLOUD TRUST MANAGEMENT MODEL FOR EVALUATION AND ESTABLISHMENT OF TRUST IN CLOUD COMPUTING

Abstract

Cloud computing (CC) is an emerging technology which is used for large scale organizations for data storage and management. It provides advantages like reducing the cost of IT services by shared computing resources and more data storage space, in addition with an on-demand and easy pay per use service mechanism. These emerging developments have a direct influence on many standard parameters like security, trust and privacy etc. On the other side many challenges are also associated with cloud computing that includes, trust establishment, data protection from unauthorized access , data recovery and backup availability when in need and data management capabilities etc. Developing customers trust is considered to be most essential of all. In this regard cloud federation is formed by different Cloud Service providers (CSPs) to share their resources so that they can satisfy their customer’s demands and expand their geographic footprints. In cloud environment it is essential to make sure that the customer’s data is fully secured and standard privacy laws are applied to form a trusted relationship and estimate the level of trust between the participating CSPs in a federation for the customer’s satisfaction. Therefore the focus of this research is to identify the issue for establishment of trusted environment and evaluation of level of trust between CSPs as it is an important requirement for CSPs to take participation in cloud federation for the best utilization of computing resources and customer attraction. The key motivation behind this research is to propose the trust evaluation model that can resolve these issue and motivates the cloud providers to successfully participate in cloud federation. In this regard, a federated cloud trust management model is presented that evaluates the level of trust based on mechanism that considers Service level agreement (SLA) parameters, feedback from customers and feedback from the participating CSPs.