SLA-based secure cloud application development

The perception of lack of control over resources deployed in the cloud may represent one of the critical factors for an organization to decide to cloudify or not its own services. The flat security features offered by commercial cloud providers to every customer, from simple practitioners to managers of huge amounts of sensitive data and services, is an additional problem. In recent years, the concept of Security Service Level Agreements (Security SLAs) is assuming a key role for the secure provisioning of cloud resources and services. This paper illustrates how to develop cloud applications that deliver services covered by Security SLAs by means of the services and tools provided by the SPECS framework, developed in the context of the SPECS (Secure Provisioning of Cloud Services based on SLA Management) European Project. The whole (SPECS) application's life cycle is dealt with, in order to give a comprehensive view of the different parties involved and of the processes needed to offer security guarantees on top of cloud services. The discussed development process is exemplified by means of a real-world case study consisting in a cloud application offering a secure web container service.