Secure and Sustainable Benchmarking in Clouds

Cloud computing entails a novel security threat: The cloud service provider is entrusted with the data of all its customers. This may not be sustainable for highly confidential data. Encryption, or more generally cryptography, may provide a solution by computing on data encrypted by the customers. While this solution is theoretically appealing, it raises a number of research questions in information system design. Using the example of collaborative benchmarking the author presents and evaluates an exemplary design and implementation of a cloud application that operates only on encrypted data, thus protecting the confidentiality of the customer’s data against the cloud service provider. The cloud application computes common statistics for benchmarking without disclosing the individual key performance indicators. Benchmarking is an important process for companies to stay competitive in today’s markets. It allows them to evaluate their performance against the statistics of their peers and implement targeted improvement measures. Copyright Gabler Verlag 2011