A broker-based cooperative security-SLA evaluation methodology for personal cloud computing

An underlying cloud computing feature, outsourcing of resources, makes the service-level agreement (SLA) a critical factor for quality of service (QoS), and many researchers have addressed the question of how an SLA can be evaluated. Lately, security SLAs have also received much attention to guarantee security in a user perspective and provide optimal and efficient security service in the security paradigm shifting by cloud computing, such as security as a service. The quantitative measurement of security metrics is a considerably difficult problem and might be considered one of the multi-dimensional aspects of security threats. To address these issues, we provide a novel cooperative security-SLA evaluation model for the personal cloud service environment including a multi-dimensional approach to analyze security threats depending on services type as well as a cooperative model to reach a general consensus of priorities, that is, indicators depending on services type and security metrics based on cloud brokers. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.