An Architecture for Detecting Information Technology Infrastructure Policy Violations in a Cloud Environment

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly becoming aware of the business value that cloud computing brings and are taking steps towards transition to the cloud. Just like any other technology it brings new security threats and challenges. A smooth transition entails a thorough understanding of the benefits as well as challenges involved. Privacy is a concern that has risen as obstacle to widespread adoption of clouds by users. Many organizations consider the deployment of different types of protection systems to curb the various malicious activities. The systems can offer sophisticated monitoring and reporting capabilities to identify attacks against cloud environment, while stopping multiple classes of attacks before they are successful against a network. Despite the use of protection systems to detect any malicious activities, some users still find ways to violate some of the laid down IT infrastructure Acceptable Use Policies. While many cloud security research focus on enforcing standard access control policies typical of centralized systems, such policies have often proved inadequate. For this reason, an architecture has been developed to automatically detect IT infrastructure policy violation in a cloud environment The implication of this research is that institutions would regain their trust in this paradigm and consider implementing policies in their clouds. Since policy violation is one of the major hindrances to the implementation of cloud computing, the policy violation detection architecture could be employed by institutions to ensure data security in cloud environment. The architecture uses software agents as its core components to collect evidence across cloud environment. The architecture captures any policy violation in the cloud environment when using any IT infrastructure. Therefore we discuss the policy violation detection architecture and present our findings in this paper.