Security-Aware Energy Management in Clouds

Cloud computing over the Internet reveals a remarkable potential to provide on-demand services to consumers with great flexibility in a cost-effective manner. Security issues coupled with resource allocations in cloud computing remain a challenging problem to be tackled by the industry and academia. While moving towards the concept of on-demand services and resource pooling in a distributed computing environment, security is a major obstacle for this new dreamed vision of computing capability. At the same time, the research on energy-efficient networking infrastructures is of great importance for service providers, network administrators, and equipment manufacturers. In this paper, we articulate novel energy-aware scheduling policies catered for virtual machines running on clouds, in which service-level agreements (SLAs) are fulfilled. After addressing security concerns in cloud computing, we advocate for a research roadmap towards future security-aware energy management in clouds. We propose a high-level design for a security- and frequency-ware DVFS model or SF-DVFS, which orchestrates security services, security overhead analysis, and DVFS control green cloud computing systems. We delve into the main technical challenges associated with the proposed SF-DVFS model. We expect that this paper will open exciting perspectives for future security research in energy-efficient cloud computing platforms.