Modeling and Executing Business Processes with Annotated Security Requirements in the Cloud

The design, deployment and execution of business process models and their associated security models is expensive and time consuming. This is because these activities usually involve multiple stakeholders that include business domain experts, security experts, web service developers and IT operations teams, and there is no streamlined development environment to allow these stakeholders to work collaboratively on a business process. We have developed a cloud-based model-driven development and execution environment called SSC4Cloud to provide a shared business process modeling workspace and a business process execution environment. More specifically, with the shared modeling workspace, business process models can be developed, refined and shared. Within the shared execution environment, a business process model is translated into a WS-BPEL based executable model, which is then assigned for execution in a virtual machine container from a shared machine cluster. The common model execution environment supports both business process execution and enforcement of the security requirements attached to the business process models.