A multi-layer hierarchical inter-cloud connectivity model for sequential packet inspection of tenant sessions accessing BI as a service

—Business Intelligence (BI) has gained a new lease of life through Cloud computing as its demand for unlimited hardware and platform resources expandability is fulfilled by the Cloud elasticity features. BI can be seamlessly deployed on the Cloud given that its multilayered model coincides with the Cloud multilayer models. It is considered by many Cloud service providers as one of the prominent applications services on public, outsourced private and outsourced community Clouds. However, in the shared domains of Cloud computing, BI is exposed to security and privacy threats by virtue of exploits, eavesdropping, distributed attacks, malware attacks, and such other known challenges on Cloud computing. Given the multi-layered model of BI and Cloud computing, its protection on Cloud computing needs to be ensured through multilayered controls. This paper proposed a multi-layered hierarchical inter-cloud connectivity model for sequential packet inspection of tenant sessions accessing BI as a service on cloud computing through an algorithm for ensuring multi-level session inspections, and ensuring maximum security controls at all the seven layers, and prevent an attack from occurring. The simulations present the effects of distributed attacks on the BI systems by attackers posing as genuine Cloud tenants. The results reflect how the attackers are blocked by the multilayered security and privacy controls deployed for protecting the BI servers and databases.