SLA-Driven Monitoring of Multi-cloud Application Components Using the MUSA Framework

The applications that rely on the combined use of multiple independent clouds pose a challenge to the control of their security. The difficulty of this task resides on the lack of insight on the cloud providers security measures, plus the need to simultaneously monitor the behaviour of multiple individual components deployed in different clouds. This paper presents the SLA-driven monitoring of multi-cloud application security compliance. In this approach, the application security levels, controls and metrics are specified at design time in the Service Level Agreement (SLA) creation process and continuously monitored at runtime once the application components are deployed over the multi-cloud. The security monitoring is based on the Montimage Monitoring Tool (MMT), that combines Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and data mining techniques to collect and analyse measurements at both network and application component levels for a holistic assurance.