SelCSP: A Framework to Facilitate Selection of Cloud Service Providers
Abstract
With rapid technological advancements, cloud marketplace witnessed frequent emergence of new service providers with similar offerings. However, service level agreements (SLAs), which document guaranteed quality of service levels, have not been found to be consistent among providers, even though they offer services with similar functionality. In service outsourcing environments, like cloud, the quality of service levels are of prime importance to customers, as they use third-party cloud services to store and process their clients' data. If loss of data occurs due to an outage, the customer's business gets affected. Therefore, the major challenge for a customer is to select an appropriate service provider to ensure guaranteed service quality. To support customers in reliably identifying ideal service provider, this work proposes a framework, SelCSP, which combines trustworthiness and competence to estimate risk of interaction. Trustworthiness is computed from personal experiences gained through direct interactions or from feedbacks related to reputations of vendors. Competence is assessed based on transparency in provider's SLA guarantees. A case study has been presented to demonstrate the application of our approach. Experimental results validate the practicability of the proposed estimating mechanisms.
Recommended Citation
N. Ghosh et al., "SelCSP: A Framework to Facilitate Selection of Cloud Service Providers," IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 66 - 79, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Jan 2015.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1109/TCC.2014.2328578
Department(s)
Computer Science
Keywords and Phrases
Clouds; Control; Distributed database systems; Network architecture; Outsourcing; Quality of service; Risk perception; Sales; Transparency; Competence; Performance risk; Reputation; Service Level Agreements; Service provider; Trust; Telecommunication services; Relational risk
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
2168-7161; 2372-0018
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2015 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Jan 2015
Comments
The work of N. Ghosh was partially supported by TCS Research Scholarship grant and that of S.K. Das by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) grants under award numbers CNS1355505, IIS-1404673 and CNS-1404677.