Towards a Monitoring Framework for the Automatic Integration of the Access Control Policies for Web Services

Abstract

Cloud computing is an emerging model of business computing that can be used to maintain configurable resources such as processors, networks, storage, operating systems, databases, and servers. Service oriented Architecture (SoA) is one of most successful paradigms deployed over the Cloud; is a layered architecture to organize software resources as services and to facilitate their deployment, discovery, and combination to produce new services. The coordination of innovations carried out between these services is a key challenge of SoA, as any failings in such services could result in a lack of availability, which may violate Service Level Agreements, leading to financial penalties or customer dissatisfaction. A service known as the Protocol service can be introduced and integrated within a system to coordinate innovations. This service may then be linked with a service called the Access Control Policies (AC_Policies) service, which identifies permissions of invocation of the Protocol service. Next, a real-time Business Activity Monitoring (BAM ) dashboard is automatically generated to supervise the process of assigning the Access Control Policies, along with the status of the executions of Web services. This approach is achieved by harnessing the capability of the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) to facilitate the automatic generation of services. As a proof of concept, this approach is implemented as a plugin.