Policy Management as a Service: An Approach to Manage Policy Heterogeneity in Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

Security issues are delaying fast adoption of cloud computing and security mechanisms to ensure its secure adoption has become a crucial immediate need. On the other hand, cloud computing can help enable security controls to be delivered in new ways by service providers. To this end, we need frameworks for efficient delivery of cloud-based security services and for provisioning desirable solutions to customers based on their requirements. In this paper, we focus on policy management systems in cloud environments. Currently, users must use diverse access control solutions available for each cloud service provider to secure data. Access control policies may be composed in incompatible ways because of diverse policy languages that are maintained separately at every cloud provider. Heterogeneity and distribution of these policies pose problems in managing access policy rules for a cloud environment. In this paper, we introduce Policy Management as a Service (PMaaS), a cloud based policy management framework that is designed to give users a unified control point for managing access policies to control access to his resources no matter where they are stored. We present the framework and describe its components and protocols needed for various components to communicate.