Abstract
The complex provider landscape in cloud computing makes incident handling difficult, as Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) with end-user customers do not necessarily get sufficient information about incidents that occur at upstream CSPs. In this paper, we argue the need for commonly agreed-upon incident information exchanges between providers as a means to improve accountability of CSPs. The discussion considers several technical challenges and non-technical aspects related to improving the situation for incident response in cloud computing scenarios. In addition, we propose a technical implementation which can embed standard representation formats for incidents in notification messages, built over a publish-subscribe architecture, and a web-based dashboard for handling the incident workflow.
