A mechanism for policy-driven selection of service providers in SOA and cloud environments

We describe a mechanism in which context is gathered relating to service providers (SPs), this is inputted to a rule-based system, and decisions are output about the suitability of each SP, including recommended stipulations regarding their usage. It can be used tor Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) to determine appropriate actions that should be allowed, or in a cloud context, to help assess risk before personal information is passed on through the cloud. It is semi-automated to significantly lower the transaction costs for the selection of SPs.