Towards an End-to-End Architecture for Run-Time Data Protection in the Cloud

Abstract

Protecting sensitive data is a key concern for the adoption of cloud solutions. Protecting data in the cloud is made particularly challenging by the dynamic changes that cloud systems may undergo at run-time, as well as the complex interactions among multiple software and hardware components, services, and stakeholders. Conformance to data protection requirements in such a dynamic environment cannot any longer be ensured during design time; e.g. due to the dynamic changes imposed by replication and migration of components. It requires run-time data protection mechanisms. This paper proposes combining multiple existing data protection approaches and extending them to run-time, ultimately delivering an end-to-end architecture for run-time data protection in the cloud. We validate the practical applicability of our approach by a commercial case study.