Autonomic Provisioning of Hosted Applications with Level of Isolation Terms

Autonomic provisioning of hosted applications in Enterprise Data Centers must be investigated as more and more business applications are executed in such an environment. In this scenario, the multiplicity and variability of software components and data to be dynamically deployed, interconnected and adjusted leads to more complex system management. In parallel, all customer requirements and constraints must be fulfilled. These requirements and constraints are specified in corresponding Service Level Agreements (SLA). Security aspects are one important part of such agreements, as in a shared, open infrastructure, perceived risks with respect to loss of information confidentiality, integrity and availability increase. Legislation and compensation mechanisms make it imperative for the Data Center to acknowledge these perceived risks. Therefore, robust application isolation mechanisms must be considered. However, potential drawbacks due to the used security mechanisms that might influence the overall system performance must be considered. In order to initialize an autonomic provisioning process, a concept for configuring the Data Center based on different Levels of Isolation is presented. Customers and Data Center providers can agree on the isolation guarantees they expect given their individual preferences specification between the perceived risks and the resulting costs associated with the chosen Level of Isolation.