Multi-tenant services monitoring for accountability in cloud computing

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a delivery model in which software resources are accessed remotely by users. Multi-tenancy is one of key properties of SaaS to achieve higher profit margin by leveraging the economies of scale. This feature empowered by virtualization comes several new complexities introduced related to the area of accountability. For this purpose, we tackle the problem of integrating multi-tenancy in cloud services accountability and determine crucial issues that can be solved. To do this, we propose a multitenant services monitoring approach that keeps monitoring service execution at runtime and detecting privacy violations. This approach is based on multitenant accountability patterns for integrating multi-tenancy architecture and expressing rules that are enforced using AOP. Furthermore, we propose a middleware layer for implementing our approach into conventional cloud architecture. The performed evaluation proves the flexibility and the efficiency of our approach for services based applications in the cloud computing.