Cloud omnibus system for evaluating cloud market services

Rapid expansion in numbers of cloud service providers (CSPs) has resulted in the introduction of various brokering services and cloud marketplaces designed to help customers to assess and choose CSPs. The problem of evaluating marketplaces and also separate sub-offerings supplied by cloud service providers (CSPs) has become vitally important because cloud marketplaces can now incorporate sub-offerings from different CSPs into a combined package tailored for each customer. In this paper, we introduce a new concept which we refer to as a cloud omnibus system (COS) and which we define as a cloud marketing system evaluating whole cloud marketplaces, CSPs, brokers and separate service sub-offerings from CSPs (sometimes combined into packages tailored for customers). COS is based on trust and management of trust and is beyond the state-of-the-art in providing a formal trust measuring mechanism for customers by introducing three types of trust which we refer to as ‘direct’, ‘relative’ and ‘transparent’.