Towards a self-protecting cloud

Abstract

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of a nation's economy. In order to remain competitive and become a market leader in this globalization era, SMEs need to look into innovative IT solutions. One of these IT solutions is cloud computing, where it delivers Infrastructure, Platform, and Software as a Service (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) on a simple pay-per-use basis. Nevertheless, enterprises are sceptical about adopting the cloud, because of the risks involved in outsourcing services into the cloud. To reduce the barrier for SMEs, this paper proposes a solution towards a two step service migration approach, 1) pre-defined Service-Level Agreement templates and 2) risk analyses, combined with a self-protecting cloud service that monitors, for example, the pre-defined privacy regulations and privacy protection measures. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.