MC-Cube: Mastering customizable compliance in the cloud

Abstract

Outsourcing parts of a company's processes becomes more and more important in a globalized, distributed economy. While architectural styles and technologies such as service-oriented architecture and Web services facilitate the distribution of business process over several departments, enterprises and countries, these business processes still need to comply with various regulations. These regulations can be company regulations, national, or international regulations. When outsourcing IT-functions, enterprises must ensure that the overall regulations are met. Therefore they need evidence from their outsourcing partners that supports the proof of compliance to regulations. Furthermore it must be possible to enforce the adherence to compliance rules at partners. In this paper we introduce so-called compliance interfaces that can be used by customers to subscribe to evidence at a provider and to enforce regulations at a provider. We introduce a general compliance architecture that allows compliance to be monitored and enforced at services deployed in any emerging cloud delivery model. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.