Control as a means towards accountable services in the cloud

Accountability provides the necessary assurance to different stakeholders (customers, auditors, regulators) about the correct execution of the obligations of each party involved in a cloud service. It requires rigorous orchestration of several security mechanisms across services, such as authentication, authorisation, logging, etc. In this paper we advocate that providing control to cloud consumers mitigates a series of risks related to the correct data handling in the cloud. We focus on the specific case of privacy enforcement in cloud platform as a service, to illustrate how a future and more general approach for policy enforcement can provide better accountability in the cloud.