Breaking Down the Monarchy: Achieving Trustworthy and Open Cloud Ecosystem Governance with Separation-of-Powers

The cloud computing ecosystem is in urgent need of effective and practical trust establishment schemes. Cloud customers currently lack approaches to effectively verify the genuine behaviours of cloud services. They can only blindly believe that the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are honest enough to not tamper with their data, while many others have avoided using the cloud entirely. Trust establishment schemes, such as cloud auditing and cloud attestation systems, lack controls and transparency over their trust building processes, which only blur the effectiveness of the proclaimed trustworthiness. We argue that these problems ultimately result from the CSPs' autocratic governance over all the activities inside the cloud. In this paper, we present a Separation-of-Powers (SoP) model by referencing the similar concepts from the discipline of the political philosophy. We define three independent roles to separate the powers of definition, enforcement, and inspection from the CSPs. These roles form the collaborative-restrictive relationship to facilitate trustworthy cloud services and achieve the balance-of-powers. We believe a model of this kind will open new opportunities for achieving trustworthy and open cloud ecosystem governance.