Updating trust value in cloud federation using iterative approach

Abstract

Cloud computing has emerged as a powerful technology over the past few years to aid quick and low-cost access to IT resources. Computing power, storage, applications, development platforms and infrastructure facilities are readily available to the consumers on pay-as-you-go basis irrespective of their geographical location. Due to an immense growth in cloud computing technology, much of the user base and organizations are shifting to cloud environment. Similarly, to meet the requirements of cloud consumers, cloud services providers (CSPs) too collaborate among each other and distribute the load and infrastructure to provide seamless services to the user. Instead of making new resources available to the consumer, the CSP reduces this cost by hiring them from the other CSP. On other hand, the underutilized resources of the collaborating CSP also produces revenue for it. This concept is acknowledged as Cloud Federation. Security and privacy issues become a hindrance in cloud federation. Thus a need for establishing and maintaining trust factor between the CSPs is essential. Existing research has developed much in the field of dynamically evaluating trust value. However, a mechanism still needs to be worked out to keep the trust value up-to-date for a new CSP entering in the cloud federation. Therefore, the focus of this research is to propose an enhanced technique to evaluate trust values by considering more SLA parameters then existing. The trust value thus established, will be updated on regular intervals of time in an iterative manner.