Towards Continuous Cloud Service Assurance for Critical Infrastructure IT

The momentum behind Cloud Computing has revolutionized how ICT services are provided, adopted and delivered. Features such as high scalability, fast provisioning, on demand resource availability makes it an attractive proposition for deploying complex and demanding systems. Clouds are also very suitable for deploying systems with unpredictable load patterns including Critical infrastructure services. Though, the major obstacle in hosting Critical infrastructures is often a lack of assurance. The transparency and flexibility offered by the Cloud, abstracts per definition over e.g. data placement, hardware, service migration. This makes it very hard to assure security properties. We present an investigation of assurance approaches, an analysis of their suitability for Critical Infrastructure Services being deployed in the Cloud and presents our approach.