Verification Requirements for Secure and Reliable Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has been widely adopted in a large variety of applications. This brings besides others also many new challenges in the fields of security and reliability. Like any other security and correctness sensitive computer system, it is beneficial to fully verify cloud solutions to ensure their correctness. Verification and validation of distributed systems has been widely studied, however, it has not been analyzed whether verification approaches in distributed systems can be directly applied to cloud computing or not. In this study, we present a comparison of verification requirements for distributed computing and cloud computing to establish the need of a specialized verification model/architecture for cloud computing. We differentiate the verification in distributed and cloud systems based on their business models, architecture models, programming models and security models. We argue that service level agreements (SLAs), which span across the cloud, become more critical in the verification process. Based on our study, we present an abstract verification model focusing specifically on cloud computing, paving the way to an implementation of a viable verification model which can practically verify complex cloud systems.