Compliance Domains: A Means to Model Data-Restrictions in Cloud Environments

It is crucial for enterprises to execute business operations in a compliant way. This is especially true for IT-driven business processes as enterprises may face considerable fines when violating laws and regulation in their business processes. Through the advent of cloud computing, a new dimension of compliance requirements within the research area of compliant business process design has emerged. Data-sovereignty is one of the major compliance concerns enterprises have to deal with when moving applications and data to the cloud. Enterprises are fully responsible for their data, also when the data is not present within their IT premises anymore. This lead to the policy that specific data must not leave the IT premises of the enterprise. In this paper we present an approach to support the human process designer in modelling compliant business processes. We are focusing on compliance requirements which have to be considered in the field of cloud computing. These requirements have been created to meet laws and regulations. These laws and regulations are considering data which is to other countries, for example. Looking at the characteristics of these requirements, we deal with data-centric compliance rules here.