An SLA Design with Digital Forensic Capabilities

Abstract

Cloud computing is getting rapid momentum as an alternative to traditional and professional Infrastructure of Information Technology due to its attractive features of getting everything in a service mode rather than in a product mode. Service mode using cloud makes the products and services cost effective. As consumers willing to pass on their tasks as services provider to cloud providers, trust factor is required especially when consumers have critical data. The Service Level Agreements (SLA) between cloud service consumers (CSCs) and cloud service providers (CSPs) play important role for building up trust between involved parties. SLA between parties is established in a satisfactory way upon agreements. Cloud computing is very dynamic in nature, hence continuous monitoring on Quality of Service (QoS) attributes as mentioned in SLA is required to be implemented dynamically. Managing SLAs is complicated due to complex nature of the cloud due to multi-tenancy and distributed resource sharing. The paper proposes a methodology for SLAs to be signed digitally and its further management in a single or multi cloud computing environment. The framework had been used in Web Service Level Agreement (WSLA) for monitoring and enforcement of SLA using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. Cloud broker agents have the capability of automatic extraction of metrics from SLAs. The use of the third party support feature to manage the digital forensics in case of requirement of any violation of SLAs suggested in the present paper and it is also solving the trust issues as demonstrated in digital forensics usage from the initiation of SLA; making the SLA naturally forensic enabled.