Automated Federation of Distributed Resources into User-Controlled Cloud Environments

Virtualization and broadband Internet connections enabled what is known today under the term cloud. Benefits like scalability and cost reduction by pay per use agreements are accompanied by potential harm to the users data. Since existing cloud solutions can be considered synonymous with unknown locations and potentially hostile environments security protection objectives can not be guaranteed. Motivated by cloud's potential we propose a way to get rid of this drawback. We present work in progress of an approach that enables users to benefit from cloud computing and retain data sovereignty by federating the users own resources. More precisely we present initial protocol design thoughts for this federation and an extension of the OCCI specification for the flexible description of own and foreign services.