The Role of SLAs in Building a Trusted Cloud for Europe

Investigating Security Capabilities in Service Level Agreements as Trust-Enhancing Instruments

“…According to data from BAE Systems, 85% of the attacks have targeted high-profile organisations, such as government ministries (55%), embassies (15%) and public organisations (12%). 1 This statistical data is also supported by the Control Risks on Risk Map Report 2016, which pointed out that governments are the top sector targeted by cyber attacks (36% of total attacks). This is not surprising, as many governments generate, collect and store far more sensitive data than the private sectors, and this data is accumulated in more vulnerable systems.…”

“…An SLA is a binding agreement between a service provider and a customer that is widely used in a variety of contexts to claim the obligation of external SPs to deliver services according to service requirements [1,3]. The concept of security-related SLAs was first proposed by Henning [5], who pointed out that security-related SLAs have a lack of tangible and measurable services because security is not quantifiable and has not been expressed in such concrete terms in SLAs.…”

IT controls in the public cloud: Success factors for allocation of roles and responsibilities

“…According to "Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2012-2016 Forecast", public IT cloud services will observe a compound annual growth rate of 26.4% between 2012 to 2016, which is five times the IT industry overall (Burns, 2012). However, given the growth of public cloud adoption, concerns about security, privacy and legal are highest in this deployment model (Ferrer & Montanera, 2015).…”

“…Organisations need people with appropriate competencies to address these concerns and to ensure security against these threats. Knowing that the public cloud environment faces highest security, privacy and legal concerns (Ferrer & Montanera, 2015), it is not surprising that 'risks, compliance, and security management' is the most significant competency required in order to evaluate and manage cloud vendors. Staff need to have the technical capabilities to assess and identify various asset or non-asset based risks (related to reputation and image); as well as the ability to assess and ensure internal and external compliance, and its effectiveness in the context of legal, governmental, and industry regulations.…”

Trust-aware life-cycle management of federated edge clouds

“…binary, numeric, linguistic), while users can adjust weights according to their specific needs and functional requirements. SLA is the fundamental mechanism that allows users to enforce guarantees about performance and conformance of single or federated Cloud services [29]. Service Level Agreements specifically establish the consensus on the characteristics of the service to be provided between the service provider and the cloud service user.…”