Keynote speech

Summary form only given. Cloud computing has become a globally accepted platform for data and activity management. Many business organizations are renting or developing their own cloud for migrating their data processing activities. For example, applications like Netflix, companies like Adobe, organizations like NASA and CIA use AWS (amazon web services) cloud platform for their data processing and data storage needs. However, some organizations, mainly finance (bank, mortgage companies, etc.) are reluctant to join the crowd for the right reasons; most important being security, privacy and trust. The cloud providers are not interested in providing the location information mainly because of the selection of the locations of data centers (DC) follows a semi-random pattern. Although some service providers do ask the customer preferred DC locations to store their data, no guarantee is given that their requests will be honored. Even if it is honored, there is no way for customers to verify or audit the provider´s claim. Further, customer´s data may migrate to other DCs without their knowledge. In conclusion, customers have no knowledge of their data location. For this reason, the reluctant organizations rightly argue that if they do not know where their customers´ data is located, they cannot provide guarantee to their customers that their data is safe and their privacy is protected. Unfortunately, under present model, location-aware data centers cannot be created without revisiting the storage model of the cloud. In our research, we are developing a location-discovery scheme which can be placed at the application level and can easily identify the geographical location of the desired DCs where users´ data is stored. We present our approach in this talk. This facility may satisfy to some extent, the security issues of financial organizations and they may think of incorporating cloud services. Our scheme confirms non-repudiation service and gives user a tool for audit- control providing strong assurances and is highly cost-effective.