Enhancement of user level controls in cloud databases

Industries in developed countries are moving quickly to ensure the rapid adoption of cloud computing. At this stage, several outstanding issues exist, particularly related to Service Level Agreements (SLAs), security and privacy. Consumers and businesses are willing to use cloud computing only if they can trust that their data will remain private and secure. Our review of research literature indicates the level of control that a user has on their data is directly correlated to the level of data privacy provided by the cloud service. We considered several privacy factors from the industry perspective, namely data loss, data storage location being unknown to the client, vendor lock-in, unauthorized secondary use of user's data for advertising, targeting secured backup and easy restoration. The level of user control in database models were identified according to the level of existence in these privacy factors. Finally, we focused on a novel logical model that might help to bring the level of user control of privacy in cloud databases into a higher level.