Security and Dependability for Federated Cloud Platforms

Summary

Computing services are increasingly pooled within global utility computing infrastructures offered by providers such as Amazon, Google and IBM. Infrastructure clouds provide virtual machines and resources. These infrastructure clouds are used to enable "platforms as a service" that simplify implementation of arbitrary scalable services.

The seminar targeted the management and protection of individual clouds and addressed the trend towards cloud federation by bringing together researchers from systems management, security, and dependability. The idea was that only such an integrated approach is able to guarantee security and dependability while preserving the essential cost and efficiency benefits of today's emerging solutions.

The challenge to address was how to provide secure and dependable services on such federated cloud platforms. Selected research questions were: How can clouds securely interoperate, how can service availability be guaranteed despite failures or attacks by individual clouds, how can existing algorithms be adjusted to provide scalable eventual consistency, and finally whether cloud-of-cloud infrastructures can provide such benefits at costs that are competitive with single cloud solutions.

While these questions where addressed during the seminar it got also clear that dependability and security of single clouds is by far not solved and therefore was also discussed in depth.