Policy based management for security in cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is one of the biggest trends in information technology, with individuals, companies and even governments moving towards their use to save costs and increase flexibility. Cloud infrastructures are typically based on virtualised environments, to allow physical infrastructure to be shared by multiple end users. These infrastructures can be very large and complex, with many end users, making their configuration difficult, error-prone and time-consuming. At the same time, the fact that diverse end users share the same physical infrastructure raises security concerns, and can lead to a significant impact from misconfiguration or being slow to react to attacks. In this paper, we focus on the use of Policy Based Management techniques to manage cloud infrastructure, identifying the requirements, surveying the state-of-the-art, identifying the challenges and proposing potential solutions. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.