Thebes

There are too many definitions of cloud computing to clearly address them all. However, it is apparent that attribute based security addresses most variants. In the public cloud, the enterprise can use this infrastructure to control the creation of and access to virtual machines in the cloud. This controls costs, gives the enterprise an opportunity to exert control over security of machines that represent it, and allows for centralized oversight of what are essentially the enterprise’s resources. In high performance computing examples, this infrastructure can allow for the creation and destruction of virtual machines to attach to a local high performance cluster, either manually or automatically based upon load. In the enterprise cloud, using virtual machines that have the proper client software installed eliminates the need for separate security implementations on each virtual machine. For example, leveraging attribute-based infrastructure allows for instantiating 1 or 100 or 10000 virtual machines can make provisioning security a matter of implementing policies across the machines, with all authentication issues already handled.