Towards a Federated Cloud Ecosystem: Enabling Managed Cloud Service Consumption

While cloud computing has seen widespread usage, there exist domains where the diminishing of management capabilities associated with cloud computing prevent adoption. One such domain is the health sector, which is the focus of the TRESOR project. Enabling cloud computing usage under strict compliance constraints such as enterprise policies and legal regulations is the goal of TRESOR. The main approach consists of a distributed cloud proxy, acting as a trusted mediator between cloud consumers and service providers. In this paper we analyze issues which arise within the TRESOR context and show how an architecture for a proposed ecosystem bypasses these issues. The practicability of our solution is shown by a proof of concept proxy implementation. As all components of the architecture will be part of our proposed cloud ecosystem, we provide a holistic and generic proposal to regain management capabilities in cloud computing.