Data Protection and Ethical Issue Analysis and Guidelines #

2 Introduction to Basics #

A wide range of definitions of the basic terms usedwithin the cloud context exists. For this document we have relied on “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing (Mell, 2011) and basic concepts that are introduced in the Austrian Security Research Study on Cloud Security for SMEs.

2.1 Service Models #

• Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) is not ultimately defined and is still an evolving concept not only put forward within the context of this project. The basic assumption is that a provider offers the capability to the consumer to map and execute a defined business process defined in standardized models with the support of supporting descriptions, models and potentially human intervention on top of a SaaS, PaaS or IaaS infrastructure
• Software as a Service (SaaS) is defined by NIST as “The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through either a thin client interface, such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email), or a program interface. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited userspecific application configuration settings.”
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) is defined by NIST as“The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment.”
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is defined by NIST as “The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls).”

2.2 Operation Models #

The Term Clouds can not only be defined along horizontal layers but orthogonally one need to consider also different operation models.

• Public cloud
• Private cloud
• Community cloud
• Hybrid cloud