Assessment Criteria for Trust Models in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is an emerging technology that provides elastic and flexible computing resources to the existing capabilities of business world. Besides several benefits of Cloud computing, there are still many challenging issues such as security and privacy of data stored on Cloud and lack of trust on Cloud service providers. Trust is one of the major barriers in the growth and adoption of Cloud by the IT industry due to absence of any reliable and efficient trust evaluation mechanism. Various trust management models have been proposed, but there exists no criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of these models in Cloud computing. In this regard, we have proposed an assessment criterion for the evaluation of trust models, containing the essential features that are mandatory for trust establishment in Cloud environment. We have also presented a detailed analysis of existing trust models and analyzed them with respect to our proposed assessment criteria. The assessment and analysis of trust models helps the customers to select the most appropriate and reliable model in accordance with their preferences and requirements.