Encryption-Based Solution for Data Sovereignty in Federated Clouds

The rapidly growing demand for cloud services in the current business practice has favored the success of the hybrid clouds and the advent of cloud federation. The available literature of this topic has focused on middleware abstraction to interoperate heterogeneous cloud platforms and orchestrate different management and business models. However, cloud federation implies serious security and privacy issues with respect to data sovereignty when data is outsourced across different judicial and legal systems. This column describes a solution that applies encryption to protect data sovereignty in federated clouds rather than restricting the elasticity and migration of data across federated clouds.