A Policy Framework for Data Management in Services Marketplaces

Large numbers of consumers, businesses, and public entities are now using the Internet for a variety of transactions. This has enabled service providers to offer outsourcing capabilities to business customers using software-as-a-service delivery models in services marketplaces. However, challenges remain in widespread acceptance of such delivery models because they require customers to share business critical data with the service providers. This paper presents a policy framework that enables businesses to communicate data management policies with service providers at an arbitrarily granular level. Policy is described as a state machine with each state representing a lifecycle stage, and attached to data when it is shared between services. Data management related policies including data appropriateness, data quality assurance, data retention and data migration can be described in this framework and enforced correspondingly.