Assurance of security and privacy requirements for cloud deployment models

Despite of the several benefits of migrating enterprise critical assets to the Cloud, there are challenges specifically related to security and privacy. It is important that Cloud Users understand their security and privacy needs, based on their specific context and select cloud model best fit to support these needs. The literature provides works that focus on discussing security and privacy issues for cloud systems but such works do not provide a detailed methodological approach to elicit security and privacy requirements neither methods to select cloud deployment models based on satisfaction of these requirements by Cloud Service Providers. This work advances the current state of the art towards this direction. In particular, we consider requirements engineering concepts to elicit and analyze security and privacy requirements and their associated mechanisms using a conceptual framework and a systematic process. The work introduces assurance as evidence for satisfying the security and privacy requirements in terms of completeness and reportable of security incident through audit. This allows perspective cloud users to define their assurance requirements so that appropriate cloud models can be selected for a given context. To demonstrate our work, we present results from a real case study based on the Greek National Gazette.