Privacy Risk, Security, Accountability in the Cloud

Migrating data, applications or services to the cloud exposes a business to a number of new threats and vulnerabilities, which need to be properly assessed. Assessing privacy risk in cloud environments remains a complex challenge, mitigation of this risk requires trusting a cloud service provider to implement suitable privacy controls. Furthermore, auditors and authorities need to be able to hold service providers accountable for their actions, enforcing rules and regulations through penalties and other mechanisms, and ensuring that any problems are remedied promptly and adequately. This paper examines privacy risk assessment for cloud, and identifies threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures that clients and providers should implement in order to achieve privacy compliance and accountability.