Extending Auditing Models to Correspond with Clients’ Needs in Cloud Environments

Abstract

The user control over the life cycle of data is of an extreme importance in clouds in order to determine whether the service provider adheres to the client's pre-specified needs in the contract between them or not, significant clients concerns raise on some aspects like social, location and the laws to which the data are subject to. The problem is even magnified more with the lack of transparency by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). Auditing and compliance enforcement introduce different set of challenges in cloud computing that are not yet resolved. In this paper, a conducted questionnaire showed that the data owners have real concerns about not just the secrecy and integrity of their data in cloud environment, but also for spatial, temporal, and legal issues related to their data especially for sensitive or personal data. The questionnaire results show the importance for the data owners to address mainly three major issues: Their ability to continue the work, the secrecy and integrity of their data, and the spatial, legal, temporal constraints related to their data. Although a good volume of work was dedicated for auditing in the literature, only little work was dedicated to the fulfillment of the contractual obligations of the CSPs. The paper contributes to knowledge by proposing an extension to the auditing models to include the fulfillment of contractual obligations aspects beside the important aspects of secrecy and integrity of client's data.

Evaluating Various Quality Factors for Splitting Nodes in Tree-Structured Spatial Indices

“…Objects that are spanned in two regions will just impose overlap if the chosen split axis is the one opposite to its longest side. Objects that are traversed in four regions will impose overlap on either axis selected, and for this case it can only predict which split axis will impose less overlap [15]. Table 1 presents a summary of the classification cases (object start region), classification subcases (object end region), the object is spanned in which regions, along with the possible overlap effect according to objects locations [14].…”