Privacy as an Integral Part of the Implementation of Cloud Solutions

Bridging the gap between design and implementation stages has been a major concern of designers, analysts and developers of information systems and a major aspiration of a number of Information System (IS) engineering approaches. Cloud computing exacerbates the strain on traditional IS engineering approaches that service-oriented computing has started. At the same time, recent research has argued about the importance of security and privacy in a cloud environment and highlighted a number of security and privacy challenges that are not present in traditional environments and need special attention when implementing or migrating information systems into a cloud environment. This paper contributes to this direction. Specifically, it presents a number of privacy-related cloud properties that analysts need to consider when designing privacy-aware systems in a cloud environment. Also it indicates a number of implementation techniques that can assist developers in assuring the respective properties.