A novel cloud management framework for trust establishment and evaluation in a federated cloud environment

Abstract

Cloud Computing is being utilized by large-scale organizations for data storage and management. It provides advantages like reducing the cost of information technology services by shared computing resources and more data storage space, in addition to on-demand and easy pay-per-use service mechanism. Different Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) form cloud federation to share their resources. In a cloud environment, it is essential to make sure that the customer’s data is fully secured, and standard privacy laws are applied to form a trusted relationship among CSPs and customers. Therefore, the focus of this research is to identify the issues for establishment of a trusted environment and evaluation of trusted levels between customers and their CSP. In this paper, a Federated Cloud Trust Management Framework (FCTMF) is proposed that resolves the trust issues and motivates the cloud providers to successfully participate in cloud federation. The proposed framework evaluates the level of trust based on Service Level Agreement (SLA) parameters, also considering customers and participating CSPs’ feedback. The results and comparison exhibit that the proposed framework is more accurate and feasible in terms of calculating level of trust.