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Clouds are composed of enormous resources and are associated with attractive properties, e.g. scalability and resilience. Such properties are the result of Clouds dynamic nature. Cloud dynamism is desirable property for different reasons such as resilience, resource consolidation, and maintenance windows. However, such dynamism exposes many security and management concerns for Cloud providers as well as for Cloud users. For example how can Cloud providers assure users that: (a.) dependent applications running on different VMs (Virtual Machines) are hosted within physical proximity (performance reasons); (b.) mutually exclusive VMs are not hosted at the same physical server (e.g. availability and security reasons); and (c.) when migrating VMs the new allocated physical servers satisfy users application requirements and security and privacy criteria. In this paper we explore this important problem. We then propose a framework, which at this foundation stage focuses on providing secure environment for the management of Clouds' virtual layer. It also helps in establishing trust in Cloud's operational management. We also propose our planned implementation layout using Open Stack.

Cloud infrastructure is expected to support Internet scale critical applications (e.g. hospital systems and smart grid systems). Critical infrastructure and even organizations will not outsource their critical resources on public Cloud without strong assurance about the trustworthiness of the Cloud Infrastructure. In this paper we focus on an important angle in this direction, which is about providing assurance to Cloud users about the trustworthiness of service delivery in a Cloud's environment (it is also known as operational trust). Specifically, we focus on analyzing the most important Clouds' properties, which enable different interested parties to assess the operational trust of a Cloud provider for delivering services. The assessment of operational trust enables Cloud users, auditors, collaborating Cloud providers, and others to compare multiple Cloud providers and decide on the best value for money. It also enables Cloud providers to understand what could be done to improve the level of services.