Security Governance in a Multi-Cloud Environment: A systematic Mapping Study

Cloud computing has revolutionized delivery of IT solutions increasing economic advantages, robustness, scalability, elasticity and security. Nowadays to achieve their cloud goals, organizations are increasingly move towards enabling multi-cloud environments which promised to support very large-scale, worldwide, distributed applications using multiple and independent cloud environments. However, given their complexity and distribution, multi-cloud has to face several key challenges around security and governance such as interoperability, portability, provisioning, elasticity, high availability and security. Therefore, these challenges increase the needs of security governance in such environments. Although some researches have been realized in the multi-cloud security domain, it becomes imperative to asses the current state of research and practice of its security governance. This paper aims to categorize the existing works related to security governance in multi-cloud environments by applying a systematic mapping study methodology in order to identify trends and future directions. Our results prove that multi-clouds security governance seems to be a promising area in multi-cloud research and evaluation.