ALBERT

Description: Establishment of trust between Cloud consumers and service providers is a challenging issue, which is a major reason why organizations are reluctant to adopt the Cloud paradigm. In order to resolve this issue, various trust models have been proposed for the Cloud domain; however, none of these models are widely accepted by the industry because they only cover a few aspects of trust establishment, and do not support all the essential features. Several problems exist in the Cloud trust models, but lack of standardization and interoperability are the primary concerns. Similarly, there is no such generic and comprehensive trust model that can establish trust on all the layers of Cloud services, namely software, platform and infrastructure. Moreover, existing trust models have their limitations in terms of providing essential functionality and security features for trust evaluation. In order to provide reliable trust establishment in the Cloud environment, there is an indispensable need to carry out research and gather knowledge about the functional and non-functional features offered by the existing Cloud trust models. Comprehensive research about trust models would further help the Cloud consumers in the selection of an appropriate model, according to their security and functional requirements. In this paper, we have performed in-depth analysis of the existing trust models in the Cloud, considering the essential functional and non-functional aspects to accurately evaluate the trust of the Cloud providers. We present panoramic taxonomies covering state of the art features, which are considered critical for trust models to effectively establish and evaluate the trust between Cloud consumers and providers. Furthermore, we have applied the proposed taxonomies as assessment criteria for the analysis of various trust models in the Cloud domain. In order to effectively demonstrate the realization and use of proposed taxonomies in real life scenarios, we have presented an extensive case study about the Health Information Exchange System.