Balancing Utility and Security: Securing Cloud Federations of Public Entities

Following their practical needs and legal constraints, recent application of the cloud paradigm among public administrations has been focused on the deployment of private clouds. Due to the increasing amount of data and processing requirements, many organizations are considering possibilities to additionally optimize their infrastructures and collaborative processes by employing private cloud federations. In this work, we present our contribution based on three real-world use cases implemented in the course of the SUNFISH project. We consider intra- and inter-organizational processes which demand secure and transparent infrastructure and data sharing. Based on derived requirements for data security and privacy in cloud federations, we propose a security governance architecture which enables a multi-layered, context and process-aware policy enforcement in heterogeneous environments. The proposed architecture relies on the micro-services paradigm to support scalability and provides additional security by integrating reactive and transformative security controls. To prove the feasibility of this work we provide performance evaluation of our implementation