Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

Social Computing and Cooperation Services for Connected Government and Cross-Boundary Services Delivery

Connected Government requires different government organizations to connect seamlessly across functions, agencies, and jurisdictions in order to deliver effective and efficient services to citizens and businesses. In the countries of the European Union, this also involves the possibility of delivering cross-border services, which is an important step toward a truly united Europe. To achieve this goal, European citizens and businesses should be able to interact with different public administrations in different Member States in a seamless way to perceive them as a single entity. Interoperability, which is a key factor for Connected Government, is not enough in order to achieve this result, since it usually does not consider the social dimension of organizations. This dimension is at the basis of co-operability, which is a form of non-technical interoperability that allows different organizations to function together essentially as a single organization. In this chapter, it is argued that, due to their unique capacity of coupling several technologies and processes with interpersonal styles, awareness, communication tools, and conversational models, the integration of social computing services and tools within inter-organizational workflows can make them more efficient and effective. It can also support the \u201clearning\u201d process that leads different organizations to achieve co-operability

Information Security in Business Intelligence based on Cloud: A Survey of Key Issues and the Premises of a Proposal

International audienceMore sophisticated inter-organizational interactions have generated changes in the way in which organizations make business. Advanced forms of collaborations, such as Business Process as a Service (BPaaS), allow different partners to leverage business intelligence within organizations. However, although it presents powerfull economical and technical benefits, it also arrises some pitfalls about data security, especially when it is mediated by the cloud. In this article, current aspects which have been tackled in the literature related to data risks and accountability are presented. In addition, some open issues are also presented from the analysis of the existing methodologies and techniques proposed in the literature. A final point is made by proposing an approach, which aims at preventive, detective and corrective accountability and data risk management, based on usage control policies and model driven engineering

WEB service interfaces for inter-organisational business processes an infrastructure for automated reconciliation

For the majority of front-end e-business systems, the assumption of a coherent and homogeneous set of interfaces is highly unrealistic. Problems start in the back-end, with systems characterised by a heterogeneous mix of applications and business processes. Integration can be complex and expensive, as systems evolve more in accordance with business needs than with technical architectures. E-business systems are faced with the challenge to give a coherent image of a diversified reality. Web services make business interfaces more efficient, but effectiveness is a business requirement of at least comparable importance. We propose a technique for automatic reconciliation of the Web service interfaces involved in inter-organisational business processes. The working assumption is that the Web service front-end of each company is represented by a set of WSDL and WSCL interfaces. The result of our reconciliation method is a common interface that all the parties can effectively enforce. Indications are also given on ways to adapt individual interfaces to the common one. The technique was embodied in a prototype that we also present

Cooperation Patterns and Adaptation Patterns for Service-Based Inter-Organizational Workflows

International audienceModernization is an effective approach to making existing mainframe and distributed systems more responsive to business needs. SOA (service-oriented architecture) is an adequate paradigm that allows companies to tap into the business value in their current systems and position IT for rapid future changes to the business model. In our research works, we focus on the use of SOA to implement Inter- Organizational WorkFlows (IOWF). The goal is to take benefits from the advantages offered by the SOA paradigm like interoperability, reusability and flexibility in order to deal with workflow models easily adaptable, evolvable and reusable. This paper focuses on two specific architectures of IOWF which are the "chained execution" and the "subcontracting"; the first issue of this work is to define Service-Based Cooperation Patterns (SBCP) suitable to the two architectures considered. A SBCP is based on SOA; it is defined through three main dimensions: the distribution of services among the partner's sites, the control of instance execution and the structure of interaction between the workflows involved in the cooperation. The second issue of the paper consists of adaptation and evolution of IOWF process models obeying to the defined SBCP. Then, we state the main operations of adaptation that can be applied on these models; we focus on adaptation at process and interactional levels. Conformably to the three dimensions of SBCP, we define three classes of adaptation patterns: "service adaptation", "control flow adaptation" and "interaction adaptation" patterns. Also, we particularly distinguish some operations of adaptation called evolution of process models based on two perspectives: the expansion of the global functionality of the process and the expansion of the cooperation; we show that some evolutions are realized by reuse of existing IOWF models. For implementation, we consider IOWF process models specified with BPEL

Flexible Loosely Coupled Inter-Organizational Workflows using SOA

8International audienceService Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm that provides important properties for the development of business applications like flexibility and loose coupling. In our research work, we focus on the use of SOA to implement specific architectures of inter-organizational workflows (IOWF). The current paper deals with the "Loosely Coupled Workflow" specifying an IOWF-architecture that connects two or more workflows -attached to a set of business partners- communicating in an asynchronous manner according to a public communication protocol conjointly defined by all partners. The first issue of this work is to define a service based cooperation pattern called LC-IOWF pattern suitable to the architecture considered in order to obtain IOWF models flexible enough to ease their adaptation. The proposed LC-IOWF pattern is based on three main dimensions: services, control of execution and interactions. Then, we define three categories of adaptation patterns corresponding to the three dimensions exhibited. Particularly, the third category of these patterns called "Interaction adaptation patterns" concerns adaptations affecting the communication protocol and constitutes a specific type of adaptation compared with other IOWF-architectures. For implementation, we consider IOWF models specified with BPEL

Smart objects as building blocks for the internet of things

The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as nearfield communications, real-time localization, and embedded sensors lets us transform everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are building blocks for the Internet of Things and enable novel computing applications. As a step toward design and architectural principles for smart objects, the authors introduce a hierarchy of architectures with increasing levels of real-world awareness and interactivity. In particular, they describe activity-, policy-, and process-aware smart objects and demonstrate how the respective architectural abstractions support increasingly complex application

Adaptive Inter-Organizational Workflow Management for E-Business Integration

As the collaboration between companies is facilitated in e-business environment, inter-organizational workflow management becomes an important issue. Because the inter-organizational workflow consists of autonomous organizational workflow, the coordination of these autonomous processes is required. In this paper, a local viewed inter-organizational workflow model is proposed, in which an inter-organizational workflow is defined as a set of block activities. Exception handling rules for internal process are defined with pertinent block activities. Based on the suggested model, a multi-agent system and a coordination algorithm are proposed. For the illustration of the suggested model, an example interorganizational workflow about book order process is presented

Designing knowledge-matching facilities for scaling climate-smart agriculture: A proposal for accelerating food systems’ transformation in a changing climate

The brief talks about designing knowledge-matching facilities for scaling climate-smart agriculture. This is a priority discussed in the International Workshop on Scaling up and out of Climate-smart Technologies and Practices for Sustainable Agriculture (an initiative initiating from 2019-MACSG20), as well as of numerous CCAFS partners in the governments, research, donor, financial and policy institutions, civil society and private sectors. CCAFS proposes to join efforts, and outlines a way forward to develop and/or shape knowledge matching facilities for accelerating food systems transformation in a changing climate. This document is intended to be a living document that informs members and interested stakeholders about intermediate results and the planned or next steps