Federated policy management engine for reliable cloud computing

Cloud computing is a relatively emerging concept of providing dramatically scalable and virtualized IT resources. The lack of novel security controls for the cloud might arise from the fact that cloud computing is the convergence of many different technological areas, including virtualization and service oriented architectures. One of the most challenging issues in clouds is to provide an appropriate level of security for the virtualized infrastructure. Indeed, each individual cloud user needs to be granted reliable security level(s) based on defined details of SLA. In this paper, a federated policy-based resource classification model has been presented to classify and manage security levels in clouds and to provide efficient mapping between access requests and defined policies of each cloud node. This federation helps to decrease the processing power of evaluating each access request. Moreover, the process of mapping requests to target nodes is more efficient by clustering cloud nodes based on common policies. The reliability and efficiency of this policy-based classification schema have been evaluated by scientific performance, security and competitive analysis.