Towards a Trust Management System for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing provides cost-efficient opportunities for enterprises by offering a variety of dynamic, scalable, and shared services. Usually, cloud providers provide assurances by specifying technical and functional descriptions in Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the services they offer. The descriptions in SLAs are not consistent among the cloud providers even though they offer services with similar functionality. Therefore, customers are not sure whether they can identify a trustworthy cloud provider only based on its SLA. To support the customers in reliably identifying trustworthy cloud providers, we propose a multi-faceted Trust Management (TM) system architecture for a cloud computing marketplace. This system provides means to identify the trustworthy cloud providers in terms of different attributes (e.g., security, performance, compliance) assessed by multiple sources and roots of trust information.