Cloud Trust Management – Issues and Developments

Cloud infrastructure is an evolving technology that offers organizations and enterprises the ability to access various elastic and scalable resources. The cloud provider offers application software that can be implemented by multiple users online. Also, the customer is provided with the capability of creating and deploying custom built applications relevant to the needs of the enterprise. In addition, scalable and elastic massive storage and computing resources is available in the different categories of cloud types. The decision for an organisation or enterprise to migrate and outsource applications to the cloud requires trust. Any customer wanting to adopt the cloud wants to be sure that the cloud provider can be trusted to meet agreed requirements. This study was executed by means of review of some literature available on cloud computing and trust management. The results indicated that users are not able to access services on their own terms, clearly eroding trust. In addition, application of encipherment in trust management was not discussed in details. Criteria for identifying quality cloud providers received less than 30% attention. Mechanisms for auditability and transparency which should have been given over 50% consideration, received less than 20%. This results will be beneficial to cloud service providers, cloud users and researchers alik