Security and Architectural Issues for National Security Cloud Computing

Abstract

Security concerns with respect to cloud computing haveimpelled the private sector to suggest a hybrid cloudarchitecture consisting of private and public clouds.For national security purposes, we advocate a hybridcloud model that consists of private, public andcommunity clouds. The community clouds in thisarchitecture are as defined by NIST, and will be usedfor inter-agency and community-of-interest (COI)information sharing and collaboration needs. Thesecurity requirements and characteristics of private andpublic clouds will not differ greatly from the privatesector. However, while the architecturalcharacteristics remain the same, we believe thatnational security community clouds will have differentsecurity features than the typical community cloud inorder to support COI requirements. In this paper, wefocus on the requirements and characteristics ofnational security community clouds that can meet theneeds of COIs.