WACC 2013 - International Workshop on Workshop on Assured Cloud Computing

The cost savings, efficiency and convenience offered by "cloud computing" in its various forms (e.g., PaaS, SaaS, IaaS) are driving the increasing adoption of this computing paradigm. While this paradigm is especially attractive to new ventures and start-ups requiring a computing infrastructure with minimal upfront infrastructure costs, cloud computing is also being leveraged by many established organizations and government agencies, both civilian and military, alike. The recent years show that cloud can successfully host many of the services that we have come to rely on both in the private and public sector, and opens the doors to many new applications and services.
Though the goal of the cloud is often to provide low-cost, pay-as-you-go robust computing, delivering a higher level of reliability and security has been one of the biggest challenges of cloud computing. Applications and the underlying cloud infrastructure are subject to failures due to accidental errors and cyber attacks. In spite of these impairments, end users (whether individuals or large business organizations) anticipate applications to perform as expected. In such an all-pervasive computing environment, system assurance (that is, providing security and reliability guarantees) has become a basic computing necessity.
An increasing number of services are being offered using cloud platforms and many of the services that we have come to rely on are expected to be provided via cloud computing. However, delivering a high level of reliability and security continues to be one of the biggest challenges of cloud computing. The main objective of this workshop is to bring together a community of researchers and practitioners from academia and industry in an effort to design dependable cloud architectures that can provide assurances with respect to security, reliability, and timeliness of computations (or services), among other properties.
The workshop will issue an open call for papers and is looking to accept up to twelve (will maintain