Data residency as a service: A secure mechanism for storing data in the cloud

Recently, researchers have been working on cloud data assurance models to ensure that the data is in compliance with the policies. In such a model, the data is placed in the intended data centres without focusing on data residency issues. Thus, in order to solve such issues, we have proposed a framework known as the data resident storage (DRS) which is intended to achieve data residency protection, thus providing data residency as a service (DRaaS). The finite state machine model is developed for the purpose of verifying the methodology in terms of data location and data access. The validation is carried out in the CloudSim toolkit with the help of defined services. The developed test automation framework places the data only in data centres that are in compliance with data residency laws. Finally, this framework can be hosted by the cloud service provider to provide DRaaS to the end users.