Security SLAs for Federated Cloud Services

Abstract

The federated Cloud paradigm aims to provide flexible and reliable services composed of a mixture of internal and external mini-clouds, but this heterogeneous nature is also fuelling the security concerns of the customers. To allay the fears and deal with the threats associated with outsourcing data and applications to the Cloud, new methods for security assurance are urgently needed. This paper presents current work on Cloud Security Service Level Agreements and our approach on how to manage this in the context of hybrid clouds. The purpose is to facilitate rapid service composition and agreements based on the necessary security requirements and establish trust between the customer and provider. We also show how this can be applied on a realistic case study related to a hybrid Unified Communication service.