A Cloud-Based BPM Architecture with User-End Distribution of Non-Compute-Intensive Activities and Sensitive Data

While cloud-based BPM (Business Process Management) shows potentials of inherent scalability and expenditure reduction, such issues as user autonomy, privacy protection and efficiency have popped up as major concerns. Users may have their own rudimentary or even full-fledged BPM systems, which may be embodied by local EAI systems, at their end, but still intend to make use of cloud-side infrastructure services and BPM capabilities, which may appear as PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) services, at the same time. A whole business process may contain a number of non-compute-intensive activities, for which cloud computing is over-provision. Moreover, some users fear data leakage and loss of privacy if their sensitive data is processed in the cloud. This paper proposes and analyzes a novel architecture of cloud-based BPM, which supports user-end distribution of non-compute-intensive activities and sensitive data. An approach to optimal distribution of activities and data for synthetically utilizing both user-end and cloud-side resources is discussed. Experimental results show that with the help of suitable distribution schemes, data privacy can be satisfactorily protected, and resources on both sides can be utilized at lower cost.