Towards User Centric Data Governance and Control in the Cloud

Cloud Computing, i. e. providing on-demand access to virtualised computing resources over the Internet, is one of the current megatrends in IT. Today, there are already several providers offering cloud computing infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS) and software (SaaS) services. Although the cloud computing paradigm promises both economical as well as technological advantages, many potential users still have reservations about using cloud services as this would mean to trust a cloud provider to correctly handle their data according to previously negotiated rules. Furthermore, the virtualisation causes a location independence of offered services which could interfere with domain specific legislative regulations. In this paper, we present an approach of putting the cloud user back into power when migrating data and services into and within the cloud. We outline our work in progress, that aims at providing a platform for developing flexible service architectures for cloud computing with special consideration of security and non-functional properties.