Security management spectrum in future multi-provider Inter-Cloud environments — Method to highlight necessary further development

The erosion of trust boundaries already happening in organizations is amplified and accelerated by Cloud computing. One of the most important security challenges is to manage and assure a secure Cloud usage over multi-provider Inter-Cloud environments with dedicated communication infrastructures, security mechanisms, processes and policies. This paper focuses on the identification of functions for different roles within future Inter-Cloud environments that belongs to the Cloud Security Management functional spectrum. Therefore, we describe all identified functional aspects and the distribution of these objects in order to define a platform independent model for the Security Management functional spectrum for Inter-Cloud called SMICS. SMICS will assist Cloud providers to analyze the necessary further development for their security management systems in order to support future Inter-Cloud environments. In addition, the better comprehension of the security management spectrum from a functional perspective will enable the Cloud provider community to design more efficient portals and gateways between Inter-Cloud providers itself respective their customer, and facilitate the adoption of this results in scientific and standardization environments.