A Novel Approach to Define and Manage Security Indicators for the Fulfillment of Agreed Assurance Levels in Clouds

Abstract

One of the most challenging obstacles for the advancement of clouds is the lack of assurance and transparency, along with the current paucity of techniques to quantify security. A fundamental requirement for solving this problem is to provide proper levels of security based on the requirements of cloud customers and sensitivity of data. However, generating these security levels only partially serves the requirements of cloud customers especially if it's not linked to the management of SLC commitments. Accordingly, a novel approach has been proposed in this paper to define and manage security indicators in the generated security levels. These indicators are used to react to eventualities that may threaten the established mechanisms of the generated security rings, to ensure the fulfillment of agreed assurance levels, and to minimize the damages in case of attacks, unpredictable events or unavoidable changes. The proposed schema uses simultaneous monitoring with two different stand-alone agents per security level. These agents are initialized based on all security policies in the SLA to enhance the process of monitoring and rectification and to increase the rate of satisfaction and reliability in clouds.