Operational trust in Clouds´ environment

Cloud infrastructure is expected to support Internet scale critical applications (e.g. hospital systems and smart grid systems). Critical infrastructure and even organizations will not outsource their critical resources on public Cloud without strong assurance about the trustworthiness of the Cloud Infrastructure. In this paper we focus on an important angle in this direction, which is about providing assurance to Cloud users about the trustworthiness of service delivery in a Cloud´s environment (it is also known as operational trust). Specifically, we focus on analyzing the most important Clouds´ properties, which enable different interested parties to assess the operational trust of a Cloud provider for delivering services. The assessment of operational trust enables Cloud users, auditors, collaborating Cloud providers, and others to compare multiple Cloud providers and decide on the best value for money. It also enables Cloud providers to understand what could be done to improve the level of services.