A Trust-Evaluation Metric for Cloud applications

Abstract

Cloud services are becoming popular in terms of distributed technology because they allow cloud users to rent well-specified resources of computing, network, and storage infrastructure. Users pay for their use of services without needing to spend massive amounts for integration, maintenance, or management of the IT infrastructure. Before interaction occurs between cloud providers and users, trust in the cloud relationship is very important to minimize the security risk and malicious attacks. The notion of trust involves several dimensions. These dimensions include: the scalability, availability, security, and usability parameters of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and DaaS. Each of these dimensions is characterized by fuzzy aspects and linguistic terms. This paper develops a model for each of the dimensions for IaaS using fuzzy-set theory. It then uses the sugeno fuzzy-inference approach for developing an overall measure of trust value of the cloud providers. It is not easy to evaluate the cloud metrics for a general domain. So, in this paper, we will use an e-learning application as the main example when we collect the data and apply the fuzzy model to evaluate the trust for cloud computing. Test and results are presented to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed model.