Supporting security requirements for resource management in Cloud Computing

We address the problem of guaranteeing security, with additional consideration on reliability and availability issues, in the management of resources in Cloud environments. We investigate and formulate different requirements that users or service providers may wish to specify. Our framework allows providers to impose restrictions on the allocations to be made to their hosts and users to express constraints on the placement of their virtual machines (VMs). User's placement constraints may impose restrictions in performing allocation to specific locations, within certain boundaries, or depending on some conditions (e.g., requiring a VM to be allocated to a different host wrt other VMs). Our approach for VM allocation goes beyond the classical (performance/cost-oriented) resource consumption to incorporate the security requirements specified by users and providers.