Towards remote security monitoring in cloud services utilizing security metrics

Large amounts of business-critical data are transferred, processed and stored in cloud services, raising concerns about their security level. Adequate security management of cloud services is vital to their success. Systematically developed and maintained security metrics can be used to offer evidence of the security effectiveness of cloud services. We propose a metrics based approach for remote security correctness monitoring in the Cloud. The approach was investigated by building a monitoring system within an experimental cloud system set-up. Moreover, we discuss how risk-driven security metrics modeling based on the decomposition of security objectives is used to manage monitoring activities.