Int. J. Grid and Utility Computing, Vol. 10, No. 6, 2019 639 Copyright © 2019 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Model-based deployment of secure multi-cloud applications Valentina Casola and Alessandra De Benedictis* Università di Napoli Federico II, DIETI, Napoli, Italy Email: casolav@unina.it Email: alessandra.debenedictis@unina.it *Corresponding author Massimiliano Rak Università della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, DII, Aversa, Italy Email: massimiliano.rak@unicampania.it Umberto Villano Università del Sannio, DING, Benevento, Italy Email: villano@unisannio.it Erkuden Rios and Angel Rego Tecnalia, Bilbao, Spain Email: erkuden.rios@tecnalia.com Email: angel.rego@tecnalia.com Giancarlo Capone CERICT s.c.r.l., Napoli, Italy Email: giancarlo.capone85@gmail.com Abstract: The wide diffusion of cloud services, offering functionalities in different application domains and addressing different computing and storage needs, opens up the possibility of building multi-cloud applications relying upon heterogeneous services, offered by multiple cloud service providers. This flexibility not only enables an efficient usage of resources, but also allows to cope with specific requirements in terms of security and performance, while requiring, however, a typically high development effort. The MUSA framework leverages a DevOps approach to develop multi-cloud applications with desired Security Service Level Agreements (SSLA). This paper describes the MUSA Deployer models and tools, which aim at decoupling the multi-cloud application modelling and development from application deployment and cloud services provisioning. With MUSA tools, designers and developers are able to express and easily evaluate the application security requirements, and to deploy it automatically by acquiring and configuring cloud services with the needed software components. Keywords: cloud security; multi-cloud deployment; automated deployment. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Casola, V., De Benedictis, A., Rak, M., Villano, U., Rios, E., Rego, A. and Capone, G. (2019) ‘Model-based deployment of secure multi- cloud applications’, Int. J. Grid and Utility Computing, Vol. 10, No. 6, pp.639–653. Biographical notes: Valentina Casola is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the University of Naples Federico II, Italy. She got a PhD degree in Computer Engineering from the Second University of Naples in 2004. Her