Isolation in Cloud Computing and Privacy-Enhancing Technologies

Cloud Computing lifts the borders between the access control domain of individuals’ and companies’ IT systems by processing their data within the application frameworks and virtualized runtime environments of Cloud service providers. A deployment of traditional security policies for enforcing confidentiality of Cloud users’ data would lead to a conflict with the availability of the Cloud’s software services: confidentiality of data would be assured but Cloud services would not be available for every user of a Cloud. This state-of-the-art contribution shows the analogy of the confidentiality of external data processing by Cloud services with mechanisms known and applied in privacy. Sustainability in Cloud is a matter of privacy, which in Cloud is called “isolation”. Copyright Gabler Verlag 2011