Supporting Cloud Accountability by Collecting Evidence Using Audit Agents

Today´s cloud services process data and let it often unclear to customers, how and by whom data is collected, stored and processed. This hinders the adoption of cloud computing by businesses. One way to address this problem is to make clouds more accountable, which has to be provable by third parties through audits. In this paper we present a cloud-adopted evidence collection process, possible evidence sources and discuss privacy issues in the context of audits. We introduce an agent based architecture, which is able to perform audit processing and reporting continuously. Agents can be specialized to perform specific audit tasks (e.g., log data analysis) whenever necessary, to reduce complexity and the amount of collected evidence information. Finally, a multi-provider scenario is discussed, which shows the usefulness of this approach.