A framework for establishing trust in the Cloud

Cloud infrastructure is expected to be able to support Internet scale critical applications (e.g. hospital systems and smart grid systems). Critical infrastructure services and organizations alike will not outsource their critical applications to a public Cloud without strong assurances that their requirements will be enforced. Central to this concern is that the user should be provided with evidence of the trustworthiness of the elements of the Cloud without getting involved into infrastructure details. In addition, users should be able to control their outsourced data at public Clouds. Establishing Cloud's trust model is important but the Cloud's infrastructure complexity and dynamism makes it difficult to address. This paper focuses on an important angle in this direction. We start by identifying the related challenges for establishing trust in the Cloud, and then propose a foundation framework which can help in addressing the identified challenges. Our focus is on laaS Cloud type and on organizations as Cloud users. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.