A Security and Privacy-Preserving Path for Enhancing Information Systems that Manage Cross-Cloud Applications

Abstract

Security is one of the most crucial elements of cloud solutions and at the same time one of the most important obstacles towards cloud adoption. This paper recommends a set of security-related guidelines for adoption by any advanced information system that aspires to offer DevOps capabilities for deploying and reconfiguring cross-cloud applications. These guidelines address several security challenges organised against three categories: user and component authentication, advanced access control and secure communication enablers. This paper also presents how specific security enhancements were designed, implemented and integrated for serving a PaaS platform that supports the lifecycle management of cross-cloud applications.