Cloud Management and Security

7 Challenges for Establishing Trust in Clouds

Establishing trustworthy Clouds is the ultimate goal of most current research in the Cloud computing area. This chapter attempts to clarify the huge challenges behind this objective. The chapter concludes with a set of research directions for establishing trust in Clouds. The remaining chapters in this book draw a set of integrated frameworks for the research directions presented in this chapter.

7.1 Introduction

Establishing trust in Clouds is an important subject that is yet to receive adequate attention from both academia and industry [1–4]. The Cloud service model attracts users coming from diverse backgrounds, with a variety of requirements. For example, users will frequently be non-technical end-users or organizations that already have a well-established enterprise infrastructure and might be interested in outsourcing part of their operations into the Cloud. Establishing trust in the Cloud should consider the requirement of different types of users, by providing them with different models. Each model should provide suitable levels of transparency in the context of technical complexities and trust establishment. In addition, trust models are not only beneficial to Cloud users, but also to Cloud providers, collaborating Clouds-of-Clouds, and external auditors. For example, trust assessment helps in the following cases:

• Exposing the components that must be trusted or are assumed to be trusted in a Cloud.
• Computing a trust ...