Trust Models in Cloud Computing - A Perspective

Abstract

Cloud computing is a new paradigm in which dynamically scalable virtualized computing resources, services and information are provided as a service among the people and organizations across the globe over the Internet. The recent developments in cloud computing technology placed numerous challenges in the field of Cloud Computing, including data replication, consistency, reliability, availability and scalability of cloud resources, portability, trust, security, and privacy. Still most of the organizations are not adapting cloud computing due to lack of trust on service provider. This paper gives an overview of cloud computing, and discusses trust and related security challenges. The important elements of cloud environment, which shapes the users trust and provides a way of evaluating each elements importance, are emphasized. Although there are many technological approaches that can develop trust in cloud provider and improve cloud security, there are currently no one-size-fits-all solutions, and future work has to tackle challenges such as trust model for security, as well as suitable mechanisms for ensuring accountability in the cloud. As trust based schemes have been widely discussed and applied in a lot of cloud computing scenarios, becoming subject of scientific researches, this paper also presents a survey of few trust models.