Methodology for Deploying Secure Applications in the Cloud
C.O. Onyekwum · Research Repository (Delft University of Technology) · 2011
There are challenges that lie in migrating enterprise applications into the cloud .Certain enterprises might want data to be partly hosted on premise in the enterprise and also partly hosted in the cloud, while other enterprises might their applications to be fully hosted on the cloud. Such hybrid possibilities can enable enterprises to benefit from cloud-based architectures, while honouring application performance requirements, but privacy issues and security considerations is always a problem during migration. This work highlights the need for security in the cloud; Different features offered by cloud providers are explored. Concepts like Virtual machine migration and a hardware chip that can be used as a basis for trust in the cloud are discussed. Pre-migration hints shows what needs to be done before the actual secure migration paths set-in. The migration path is based on a generalisation of the kind of threats these features are exposed to. There are arguments as to why such paths are the most secure. It is a fact that cloud computing infrastructures enable companies to cut costs by outsourcing computations on-demand, however, clients of cloud computing services currently have no well acknowledged means of verifying the confidentiality and integrity of their data and computation. To address this problem, it was part of the migration strategy in this work to design a system that enables a cloud provider to provide an execution environment that guarantees integrity in the execution of virtual machines for its clients, but the design works in hand with a trusted third party.