The Measurement of Data Locations in the Cloud

Abstract

If a company uses cloud computing services to process their employees or their customers personal data, they need to ensure that the cloud provider complies with the relevant privacy statues. One of the things that need to be ensured is that all personal data are processed only in lawful locations. Data sources that can be used to automatically determine the current location of data processing could help cloud users to ful fill their duty and to strengthen the confidence in a privacy friendly processing of their personal data. For that, data location metrics need to be defined, appropriate data sources need to be determined and the measured data need to be combined reasonable. This paper describes the procedure and system architecture of such data location metrics.