An Autonomic Legal-Rule Aware Cloud Service Broker

The ICT industry, and specifically critical sectors such as healthcare, transportation, energy and government require as mandatory the compliance of the ICT systems and services with legislation and regulation, as well as with standards. In the era of cloud computing, and particularly in a public cloud scenario, this law and regulation compliance management issue is exacerbated by the distributed nature of the system and by the limited control of the customer on the infrastructure/services. Also if the cloud industry is aware of this legislation/regulation compliance issue (e.g. the compliance program of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure), right now, there are no mechanism/architectures capable to check and to assure that the compliance is guaranteed during the whole life cycle of a cloud service, off-line and at run-time. In this paper we outline a reference architecture for the autonomic and legislation-aware cloud service broker and we propose a run-time linear programming based model that consider legal constraints and that perform service adaptation for the assurance of QoS and legal rule compliance.