Scaling trust and reputation management in cloud services

Trust and reputation (TR) are critical considerations in the adoption of cloud services. However, there are challenges in managing TR among cloud service providers that trickle down to the service requesters. The trends used currently for TR management are ad hoc and mostly driven by need and different approaches for representing TR management in cloud services have been proposed. A hybrid of the various methods and models yields a near optimal solution for TR management in cloud services. The hybrid can be constructed from the pool of TR management options for cloud services, the different technologies applied in cloud management, and the impact factors for the different categories of cloud services. These technologies and categories of cloud services are presented in this paper. With the increased use of cloud services, there is an urgent need for explicit institutional arrangements that will help in monitoring and regulation to secure TR in cloud computing platforms and environments.