Enforcing confidentiality in a SaaS cloud environment

Achieving confidentiality is a critical concern that deters enterprises from using public cloud services. In the environment of Public Software as a Service (SaaS) it is even more serious because customers lose their system controls, and rigid service level agreements do not state detail security protection methods and provide sufficient legal guarantees. To resolve these issues, this paper proposes the concept of a SaaS Confidentiality Risk Management (SCoRiM) Framework as a holistic and flexible approach to enable small and medium sized enterprises to protect their critical data. It is aimed to enhance the data confidentiality management with and without support from the providers throughout the entire SaaS integrated system development life cycle.