CloudVO: Building a secure virtual organization for multiple clouds collaboration

Cloud computing has become a popular computing paradigm in which virtualized and scalable resources are consolidated to provide services over Internet. However, the resource capability of a single cloud is generally limited, and some applications often require various cloud centers over Internet to deliver services together. Therefore, a Virtual Organization (VO) will be a promising approach to integrate services and users across multiple autonomous clouds. However, how to build a secure virtual organization to achieve the collaboration goals is a critical problem, and some issues such as membership agreement, policy conflict and trust management should be adequately addressed. In this paper, we present a framework CloudVO which based on security policies and trust management techniques to provide some flexible and dynamic VO management protocols for clouds. Therefore, CloudVO can achieve inter-cloud collaboration without destroying a cloud's local policies. Based on previous VO security management experiences, we have conducted some preliminary simulations to verify the effectiveness our approaches for cloud computing environments.