A survey of compliance issues in cloud computing

TLDR: The lack of reference architectures and relevant patterns makes compliance harder than it should be, and some guidelines are given about what this architecture and its corresponding patterns should contain.

Abstract: Features such as elasticity, scalability, universal access, low entry cost, and flexible billing motivate consumers to migrate their core businesses to the cloud. However, in doing so there are challenges about security, privacy, and compliance. Businesses are pressured to comply with regulations depending on their service types; for example, in the US government agencies are required to comply with FISMA, healthcare organizations are required to comply with HIPAA; public retail companies must to comply with SOX and PCI. We survey work on compliance issues and we conclude that the lack of reference architectures and relevant patterns makes compliance harder than it should be. We also explore current industrial trends of compliance approaches. We end by summarizing compliance issues and give some guidelines about what this architecture and its corresponding patterns should contain.