Cloud Incident Management, Challenges, Research Directions, and Architectural Approach

With the ongoing advancements in Cloud Computing, new technologies and standards are being developed, ever increasing the complexity of this environment along with the associated risks, thus making it difficult for companies to take advantage of the benefits Cloud Computing brings without being exposed to them. Due to this increased complexity, there is an increased chance of a deviation from the normal operation which can lead to a reduction or interruption of quality of service, to service shortages, to an incident. Cloud Incident Management is thus an important research direction that is being addressed in this paper, which focuses on providing a complete support for the cloud incident lifecycle from its detection to its resolution. The paper covers existing solutions and standards, challenges and open issues as well as proposes an architecture for Cloud Incident Management.