Risk-aware virtual resource management for multitenant cloud datacenters

Abstract

The multitenancy and virtualization features of cloud computing enhance resource utilization and lower the cloud provider's total cost of hosting customer data for big data applications. However, cloud computing has many security challenges that are exacerbated by virtual resource sharing. In particular, sharing resources among potentially untrusted tenants can increase the risk of information leakage due to vulnerability of virtual resources causing side channel attacks or virtual machine escape. For big data applications, an access control policy such as role-based access control (RBAC) can be used to control data sharing among cloud customers. This article aims to develop efficient risk-aware virtual resource assignment mechanisms for the cloud's multitenant environment. The authors present two resource assignment heuristics, including a scalable solution, and compare their relative performance.