Efficient and secure intercloud framework

Abstract

The Intercloud represents the idea of a global ecosystem of collaborating CSPs offering potentially infinite compute resources enabling seamless resource provisioning and consumption. Various standardization bodies, working groups and research communities are working hard to provide a comprehensive framework but service deployment, orchestration, provisioning, Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance and security present significant challenges in an intercloud environment. This research proposes an efficient and secure intercloud framework Services management in InTercloud for Efficiency and Security (SITES) , for unified services management in the intercloud environment. The SITES framework proposes a novel resource discovery mechanism, which provides direct CSP to CSP interaction, a contrast to traditional approaches where central entity is required for service scalability. A comparison of existing techniques with the proposed mechanism establishes the viability of the proposed mechanism. SITES also proposes a services management mechanism which provides an on-demand ranking mechanism for service consumers. It allows greater optimization at an individual level rather than traditional one-size-fits-all approach. In this scenario users consume services by specifying cost and different Quality of Service (QoS) related constraints like latency, processing time, reliability, reputation and availability which are measured and tracked automatically within SITES. Individual users are therefore able to reduce their overall cost of service consumption compared to existing mechanisms while enjoying improved QoS-compliance. Real-world experimentation along with simulations show that SITES orchestrated services conceded significantly lower SLA violations even in the face of flash-crowd scenarios. This results in potentially increased profits for service providers over traditional mechanisms. Finally SITES framework proposes a novel mechanism for detecting malicious applications based on application profiling and minimizing their impact using a containment-based security model. Encouraging results have been obtained by detecting malicious applications through comparison of resource consumption and performance time-series data pertaining to CPU usage, memory usage and inbound/outbound traffic of executing applications with known malicious applications. The realization of the SITES framework for an intercloud environment results in enhanced capability to deliver services to end users in a customized manner while maximizing service provider revenue in a secure environment. This results in efficient management of cloud services, reducing cost for end users as well as service providers while increasing overall experience in a secured environment.