A DYNAMIC POLICY-BASED SECURITY-AS-A-SERVICE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR CLOUD ENVIRONMENT

Sumathi D, Poongodi P, Krishnan R

Abstract: In the cloud environment, implementing and managing information security is extremely challenging in not only cloud end but user end also. The organizations would critically examine several factors of cloud hosting provider and security is the most important one. Cloud hosting providers have the obligation to support Quality of Service (QoS) and Service Level Agreement (SLA) parameters such as strong security, zero-tolerance downtime and intrusion detection & prevention mechanism. Cloud hosting provider may not have the required resources and mechanisms to update the security infrastructure regularly. If compromised, the hosted applications would be prone to attacks and vulnerabilities resulting in application downtime, loss of data and theft resulting in loss of trust with customers. A collaborative approach among various security providers is the need of the hour. The outcome of this collaborative approach is the design and implementation of a policy-based security as a Service (Sc-aaS) system that would have the capability of dynamically inquiring and provisioning security services for the cloud hosting provider in a transparent manner as per the requirements sought by the hosted application

Keywords: Software-as-a-Service, Cloud Security Provider (CSP), Cloud Hosting Provider; Security Policy, WS-security, WS-policy, WS-Agreement

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2014.0319013