Secure service interaction for collaborative business processes in the inter-cloud

The emergence of a closer relationship between cloud service providers in the cloud computing market is the inevitable consequence of the computing as utility concept. The closer cooperation creates competitive advantages for providers and users of cloud services as well. Capacities and services can be used in a collaborative and flexible way. Despite the numerous potentials of composite cloud services, trust, policy and privacy are the major challenges resulting from the distributed and flexible data handling. The paper derives requirements and solutions in the field of inter-cloud service communication with a special focus on security. The proposed architecture is evaluated with a sample collaborative business process of inter-cloud service interaction.