Trust as a facilitator in cloud computing: a survey

Cloud computing offers massively scalable, elastic resources (e.g., data, computing power, and services) over the internet from remote data centres to the consumers. The growing market penetration, with an evermore diverse provider and service landscape, turns Cloud computing marketplaces a highly competitive one. In this highly competitive and distributed service environment, the assurances are insufficient for the consumers to identify the dependable and trustworthy Cloud providers. This paper provides a landscape and discusses incentives and hindrances to adopt Cloud computing from Cloud consumers' perspective. Due to these hindrances, potential consumers are not sure whether they can trust the Cloud providers in offering dependable services. Trust-aided unified evaluation framework by leveraging trust and reputation systems can be used to assess trustworthiness (or dependability) of Cloud providers. Hence, cloud-related specific parameters (QoS+) are required for the trust and reputation systems in Cloud environments. We identify the essential properties and corresponding research challenges to integrate the QoS+ parameters into trust and reputation systems. Finally, we survey and analyse the existing trust and reputation systems in various application domains, characterizing their individual strengths and weaknesses. Our work contributes to understanding 1) why trust establishment is important in the Cloud computing landscape, 2) how trust can act as a facilitator in this context and 3) what are the exact requirements for trust and reputation models (or systems) to support the consumers in establishing trust on Cloud providers.