SECCRIT · SEcure Cloud computing for CRitical infrastructure IT

Cloud Computing is a style of computing where elastic IT-related capabilities are provided as optimized, cost-effective, and on-demand utility-like services to customers using Internet technologies. Being one of the major trends in the IT industry recently, it has gained tremendous momentum and started to revolutionize the way enterprises create and deliver IT solutions. As more sectors adopt cloud services in their computing environment, the trend will also reach ICT services operating critical infrastructures (CI), such as transportation systems or infrastructure surveillance.Hosting CI services in the cloud brings with it security and resilience requirements that existing cloud offerings are not well placed to address. Due to the opacity and elasticity of cloud environ-ments, the risks of deploying CI services in the cloud are difficult to assess – specifically on the technical level, but also from legal or business perspectives. Traditional IT security measures cannot fully tackle the issues (e.g. risk, trust, and resilience) arising from this paradigm shift, especially for operators and manufacturers of CI IT systems. Therefore, the mission of the SECCRIT project is to analyse and evaluate cloud computing technologies with respect to security risks in sensitive environments, and to develop methodologies, technologies, and best practices for creating a secure, trustworthy, and high assurance cloud computing environment for CI.In order to accomplish this mission, the objectives of the SECCRIT project are: identification of the relevant legal framework and establishment of respective guidelines, provision of evidence and data protection for cloud services; understanding and managing risk associated with cloud environments; understanding cloud behaviour in the face of challenges; establishment of best practice for secure cloud service implementations; and the demonstration of SECCRIT research and development results in real-world application scenarios.