Quantification of Security for Compute Intensive Workloads in Clouds

Cloud computing is a promising technology to facilitate development of large-scale, on-demand, flexible computing infrastructures. However, improving dependability of cloud computing is critical for realization of its potential. In this paper, we describe our efforts to quantify security for Clouds to facilitate provision of assurance for quality of service, one of the factors contributing to dependability. This has profound implications for delivering customized security solutions such as effective intrusion prevention and detection which is the overall objective of our research. In order to demonstrate the applicability of our research, we have incorporated these requirements in the resource acquisition phase for Clouds. We also present experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to address the random migration problem for virtualized computing environments.