A Framework for Centralized Access Monitoring over Cloud Architectures

While we talk about monitoring, the performance and compliance aspects are only on focus, however, the fine grained access logs also needs to be maintained if a proper internal audit is to be realized at organization level. Also, we do need to maintain long term logs for auditing purposes at internal auditing. In generic monitoring services provided by most of the cloud vendors, the case of monitoring users at organization level is not covered so far. It is also to be realized that internally cloud users (as an organization) can delegate the leased resources to its internal employees. In such cases the auditors would require the usage logs having various audit parameters. If the logs maintained at user levels can be verified with the logs maintained at cloud level, then the trust among the cloud vendors and the user will go up by almost hundred percent. The setup of a cloud monitor model along with centralized, verifiable and long term logs can be realized by a cloud framework presented hereby. The paper discusses the viability of the proposed framework over popular open source monitoring tools available and used by many cloud architectures.