A MAS-Based Cloud Service Brokering System to Respond Security Needs of Cloud Customers

Abstract

-Cloud computing is becoming a key factor in computer science and an important technology for many organizations to deliver different types of services. The companies which provide services to customers are called as cloud service providers. The cloud users (CUs) increase and require secure, reliable and trustworthy cloud service providers (CSPs) from the market. So, it's a challenge for a new customer to choose the highly secure provider. This paper presents a cloud service brokering system in order to analyze and rank the secured cloud service provider among the available providers list. This model uses an autonomous and flexible agent in multi-agent system (MASs) that have an intelligent behavior and suitable tools for helping the brokering system to assess the security risks for the group of cloud providers which make decision of the more secured provider and justify the business needs of users in terms of security and reliability.Keywords -Cloud Computing, Brokering System, Multi-agent System, Security Risk.I. InTROducTIOn c lOud computing [1] is a new paradigm of utility computing and enormously growing phenomenon in the present IT industry hype .Many companies, enterprises and organizations outsource some of their information systems to benefit from the cloud services which are Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). The main interesting features of a cloud are the cost decrease and a faster time to market. Based on sharing resources, the cloud computing changes the user concerns from managing an infrastructure to only focusing on their core business. Currently there are many numbers of providers, but finding the best cloud service provider is difficult. Thus, it is a challenge for the users to choose the more secured cloud provider for fulfilling their requirements.Nowadays, a few efforts have been devoted to building tools and frameworks that can permit customers to evaluate cloud offerings and rank them based on their ability to meet the user's quality of service (QoS) and security requirements. This is a major problem for every user, especially those who are more concerned about data security and privacy from CSP. For this purpose, cloud brokers [2] have emerged; they can help cloud consumers to select adequate solutions by comparing existing offers, essentially against their prices.A secure computer system provides guarantees regarding the confidentiality, integrity, availability, non-repudiation and authenticity of its objects (such as data, processes or services). Security is related to vulnerabilities in software, and these are hard to foresee or detect before an actual attack; security involves personal aspects (e.g., user or operator issues) and aspects of the operational environment that are often beyond the control of the development teams. As cloud computing presents new kinds of security risks [3], [4], they need to be treated before wider adoption. Accordingly, we have to dispose a system that measure and rank the secured c...