Effects of Legal and Regulative Constraints on Cloud and its Federated Environment

Cloud Computing (CC) has recently emerged as a paradigm offering its customers software, infrastructure, and platform to be delivered on Internet as a seamless service. In order to successfully “externalize” IT systems and services, a closer look is required, discerning what are the factors that influence and constrain such a externalization. Externalization can include anything (such as platform, software, network, or database) being delivered as cloud or federated cloud based service.
Factors influencing CC can be categorized into multiple domain such as technical, economical, and organizational. These factors can be mutually dependent and contradictory. Also, the legal and regulative constraints can influence the relations between these factors, and impact the relationship between various stakeholders (e.g., cloud service provider, cloud broker, cloud customer) involved in CC.
Therefore, the current understanding on details of those factors, their interdependencies, and respective impacts resulting out of those in given scenarios or instances is not fully available. As such details to determine an important facet of the operation of modern technology in a globalized world, a more structured and principle modelling as well as the determination of relevant characteristics can lead to an effective and cost-efficient operation of CC in a better understood legal and regulatory environment. The target of the thesis is to build a XML based taxonomy of the relevant factors and their interrelations, within the legal and regulative constraints.