The Cloud model has now emerged as an efficient way to provide and consume services. However, as more and more companies are beginning to embrace the new trend, it has become imperative to tailor solutions for some of its inherent concerns including security and interoperability. For instance the processing and storage of data using third party means together with the devolution of some security matters to the cloud service providers further raises the fear of data leakage, availability, portability, integrity and confidentiality. Establishing confidence in the usage of cloud services and thus maintaining the current cloud computing momentum relies on (amongst others):

- The availability of means through which the concerned Cloud Service Consumers could keep an eye on the key security indicators of the provider;

- The ability by the consumer to receive prompt notifications of security incidents emanating the CSP infrastructure,

- The ability to hold the provider accountable in the event the provided service does not meet clauses stipulated in the Service Level Agreement.

This special issue solicits research and industrial papers that present original contributions related to the area of security and security transparency in cloud services. Topics of interest include (but not limited to):

- SLA specification and monitoring in the cloud
- Auditing of cloud services
- Data security and privacy in the cloud
- Modelling and designing for security transparency
- Incident detection, prediction and reporting
- Requirements engineering for security transparency in cloud services
- Risk management in cloud based services
- Secure information exchange
- Security and Interoperability
- Virtual machine monitoring

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline: 30 April 2014
Authors notification: 30 May 2014
Final Manuscript: 16 June 2014


Submission:

The special issue seeks original, unpublished work on potential means to foster better security and transparency in cloud based services. Submitted papers must be formatted according to the journal's instructions, which can be found at: http://www.scpe.org/index.php/scpe/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

Special Issue Editors:

Moussa Ouedraogo, CRP Henri Tudor, Luxembourg
Haralambos Mouratidis, University of Brighton, United Kingdom
Massimiliano Rak: Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli, Italy
Jesus Luna: Cloud Security Alliance, United Kingdom

Scalable Practice: Computing and Experience, is a quarterly open access journal indexed in Scopus, DBLP, DOAJ, EBSCO, and CiteFactor.