Supporting User Protection Requirements in Cloud-Based Data Outsourcing

The cloud is nowadays widely used for storing and managing data, and leveraging scalable and flexible IT infrastructures while guaranteeing continuous data and application availability from anywhere at any time. The cloud market is characterized by a rich and diversified offering that usually comes as predefined configurations (plans), which can be adopted to outsource data collections. Such plans exhibit different features and characteristics, which make different plans suitable to different scenarios. Seemingly a trivial problem, selecting a plan that responds well to the needs of a data owner is actually far from easy. In fact, the problem entails a number of challenges that need to be carefully addressed, ranging from representing and reasoning on plans’ characteristics, to permitting data owners to formulate (and have enforced) expressive requirements to identify an optimal (combination of) plan(s) without requiring deep technical knowledge of the cloud technology and jargon. In this paper, we address this problem, discussing some of its main challenges, and illustrating some research directions and state-of-the-art solutions.