Cloud Management and Security

Drawing on more than fifteen years of professional work, the author lays out the groundwork for cloud computing and the technologies that underpin it. The opening section examines how cloud is defined, how it has developed, the service models and deployment options available, and the principal difficulties it poses.

The rest of the book falls into three parts. The first covers the building blocks of clouds and federated clouds, including how they interact and are deployed, the platforms used to manage resources and services, the key properties of cloud infrastructure, and automated management of virtual machines and application resources. The second part asks how a cloud can be made trustworthy. It considers frameworks and mechanisms for meeting security challenges, remote attestation, and the establishment of cloud trust anchors, then presents a framework for a trustworthy provenance system and explains how it supports forensic investigation, guards against insider threats, and assures ongoing operations.

The final part draws on practical examples, describing commercial and open source products that put the earlier concepts into practice, along with a real-life case study focused on cloud security. Throughout, the book analyzes the risks tied to particular services and deployment models, suggests ways to reduce them, and proposes a research roadmap for next-generation trustworthy cloud computing.

The text is designed for professionals, decision makers and students. It includes illustrations, real-world deployment scenarios, exercises with solutions, and PowerPoint slides for instructors.