Supporting accountable business to business document exchange in the cloud

Business-to-Business (B2B) interactions can be defined in terms of the exchange of documents. Such exchanges must be regulated to comply with obligations including service agreements, contracts and law. It is fundamental to such regulation that participants are held accountable for their actions. This can be achieved through the deployment of support services to produce a verifiable audit trail of interactions. Typically these support services have been designed to be deployed in-house, placing requirements on infrastructure and technical ability. Cloud and utility computing allow this support to be delivered as a cloud hosted service by a specialist security provider, alleviating the aforementioned concerns for businesses. This paper analyses various possibilities for leveraging the cloud in this way and reports on the design and implementation of a document exchange service constructed using cloud-based infrastructure.