Cloud computing enables on-demand, self-provisioned elastic computing. In addition to public cloud offerings, the private cloud has emerged on a wider scale and has been adopted by both the enterprise and public sectors. Several open-source middleware products have appeared for use with private cloud deployments. One challenge with these various cloud products is connectivity between different organizations. The idea of federated cloud services is new, and various research papers and projects are addressing it.

There can be various levels of federation, such as authentication, accounting, and virtual machine sharing. This paper addresses the issue of how to enable federation of logging and audit records. In this scenario, a user from an organization might launch a cloud instance in a different organization. During this cross-organizational process, the user’s audit records have to be maintained and transmitted back to the initiating organization for auditing. This paper deals with this problem and proposes a solution.

The authors’ approach is novel and the solution presented advances the field. This detailed paper will benefit cloud system administrators.