Section: New Results

Optimization and security of business processes in SaaS contexts

Participants : Claude Godart, Elio Goettelmann, Samir Youcef.

Globalization and the increase of competitive pressures created the need for agility in business processes, including the ability to outsource, offshore, to take opportunity of the cloud, or otherwise distribute its once-centralized business processes or parts thereof. While hampered thus far by limited infrastructure capabilities, the increase in bandwidth and connectivity and decrease in communication cost have removed these limits. This is even more true with the advent of cloud, particularly in its “Service as a software” dimension. To adapt to such a context, there is a growing need for the ability to fragment one’s business processes in an agile manner, and be able to distribute and wire these fragments so that their combined execution recreates the function of the original process. Our work is focused on solving some of the core challenges resulting from the need to dynamically restructure enterprise interactions. Restructuring such interactions corresponds to the fragmentation of intra- and inter-enterprise business process models. It describes how to identify, create, and execute process fragments without loosing the operational semantics of the original process models. In addition, this fragmentation is complicated by the constraints of quality of service, in particular the execution time and the cost, and of security, especially privacy. During the year, we consider this problem at two levels: the design of privacy-aware process models, and the optimization of process schedules. We developed a methodology to integrate privacy concerns in the design of a business process before distribution in the cloud [11] . Based on a risk analysis, the result of the design is a set of process (re)modeling actions, a set of constraints on process fragments assignments to clouds, and a set of constraints for cloud selection based on cloud properties [12] .