Concerns over cloud provider security remain one of the top inhibitors to adoption of cloud deployment models. Potential consumers of cloud deployments need assurance that the security policies they require on their applications are consistently managed and enforced “in the cloud” as they would be in their enterprise.
A cloud provider’s ability to provide specific audit event, log, and report information on a per-tenant and application basis is essential. It is apparent that in order to meet these customer expectations, cloud providers must provide standard mechanisms for their tenant customers to self-manage and self-audit application security that includes information about the provider’s hardware, software, and network infrastructure used to run specific tenant applications.
A proven method to address such needs is to develop open standards to enable information sharing. Specifically, this specification provides a data format and interface definitions that support the federation of normative audit event data to and from cloud providers in the form of customized reports and logs. This specification also defines a means to attach domain-specific identifiers, event classification values, and tags that can be used to dynamically generate customized logs and reports for cloud subscribers or customers.
Adoption of this and other open standards by cloud providers’ management platforms would go far to instill greate trust in “cloud hosted applications” and be a significant step forward in fulfilling the promise of an open cloud marketplace.