Contract-based cloud architecture

Cloud Computing as a service on demand architecture has become a topic of interest in the last few years. The outsourcing of duties and infrastructure to external parties enables new services to be established quickly and with low financial risk. These services also can be scaled on demand. Nevertheless, several issues such as security and legality should be considered before entering the cloud. The financial benefits of cloud services conflict with the need to secure and control the access to outsourced information. Companies have to comply with diverse laws across jurisdictions and are accountable to various national regulators. Security requirements may not be compatible with those offered by existing providers. In this paper, we propose an architecture to facilitate the integration of these security requirements in the cloud environment and to address the legal issues attached. Our approach customizes the selection of a service provider based on the companies preference. We also define a trusted third party to handle the monitoring and auditing processes over different service providers.