Security SLA Based Monitoring in Clouds

Abstract

Nowadays, Cloud providers revise the terms of their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to include security provisions due to their criticality for their customers. In order to speed up their adoption by service providers and consumers and to make them more actionable, security SLAs monitoring should be described in a machine-processable, agile and extensible way. Several tools for SLA management are available on the market but most deal with performance metrics and do not refer to security properties. There are other tools for monitoring cloud security, in a non-SLA way. However, they are not associated with SLA management systems. We propose an extension to an SLA language (i.e., rSLA) to enable the description of security requirements in an SLA document. We also extend the rSLA framework by a security methodology that makes use of known tools and that enables continuously checking that the security requirements are respected during runtime according to the SLA document.