Ontology of Secure Service Level Agreement

Abstract

Maintaining security and privacy in the Cloud is a complex task. The task is made even more challenging as the number of vulnerabilities associated with the cloud infrastructure and applications are increasing very rapidly. Understanding the security service level agreements (SSLAs) and privacy policies offered by service and infrastructure providers is critical for consumers to assess the risks of the Cloud before they consider migrating their IT operations to the Cloud. To address these concerns relative to the assessment of security and privacy risks of the Cloud, we have developed ontologies for representing security SLAs (SSLA) in this paper. Our ontologies for SSLAs can be used to understand the security agreements of a provider, to negotiate desired security levels, and to audit the compliance of a provider with respect to federal regulations (such as HIPAA).