Off-Line Risk Assessment of Cloud Service Provider

The acceptance of cloud as a platform to migrate applications has seen a boom in the past few decades. Hosting applications on the cloud cuts down its maintenance and infrastructure costs. Nonetheless security of these applications on the cloud is one of the primary concerns which prevents complete adoption of cloud. Although cloud provides security, they do not address it in terms of application security and thus organizations cannot fully comprehend them. In this paper, we propose an off-line risk assessment framework to evaluate a cloud service provider's security from the point of view of an application to be migrated there. Once the most secure cloud service provider is determined for an application, the framework will perform a cost-benefit tradeoff analysis to estimate an optimal cloud migration strategy.