Towards a framework for survivable clouds

Cloud computing is an extremely popular computing paradigm with academia and industry. This amount of popularity stems from the various properties of the cloud including ease of use, elasticity, reduced maintenance and energy costs for the consumer, and a pay-as-you-go model. As Enterprise computing migrates from on-site compute resources to cloud-based resources, an increased amount of adoption may occur. Adoption at this scale may present various challenges for cloud providers with respect to the ability to provide fault-free execution for users as well as mitigating attacks by malicious parties. In order to handle these difficulties, survivability may be applied to the cloud architecture such that increased adoption of cloud computing results in increased profits for both the consumer and provider.;Survivability is the capability of a system to fulfill its mission regardless of attacks, failures, or natural disasters. Allowing cloud consumers to make use of an environment in which their applications should be trusted to execute to completion regardless of potential attacks and failures is of the utmost importance. This would increase trust in the cloud providers and increase adoption of current cloud systems by new consumers while providing mechanisms to tolerate failures and mitigate attacks.;This dissertation proposes the cloud survivability framework (CSF) as a potential method to move towards a survivable cloud. The CSF is a user-level, component-based framework, which applies the properties of survivability including fault and intrusion tolerance to current Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud architectures. The components composing the CSF are a coupling of high-level management systems and low-level mechanisms providing proactive and reactive fault and intrusion tolerance while making an effort to meet SLA guarantees.