COAT: Cloud Offerings Advisory Tool

There is a pressing need to make the differences between cloud offerings more transparent to cloud customers. Examples of properties that vary across cloud service providers (and that are reflected in cloud contracts) include subcontracting, location of data centres, use restriction, applicable law, data backup, encryption, remedies, storage period, monitoring/audits, breach notification, demonstration of compliance, dispute resolution, data portability, law enforcement access and data deletion from servers. In this paper we present our Cloud Offerings Advisory Tool (COAT), which matches user requirements to cloud offers and performs a comparison of these cloud offerings. It makes the non-functional requirements listed above more transparent to cloud customers, offering advice and guidance about the implications and thereby helping the cloud customers choose what is most appropriate.