Unifying Compliance Management in Adaptive Environments through Variability Descriptors (Short Paper).

When managing IT environments and designing business processes, compliance regulations add challenges. Especially considering adaptive environments in the context of a service-oriented architecture in combination with exploiting the advantages of cloud technologies, maintaining compliance is cumbersome. Measures have to be taken on many application levels - including business processes, IT architecture, and business management. Although a lot of work has been done on various approaches covering compliance on one or more of these levels, in large companies more than one approach is likely to be employed. However, a unified approach for supporting the compliance tasks - like introduction, maintenance, and especially adaptation - on different levels of business and IT is missing. This work introduces this unifying approach, which links compliance requirements to implementing technology using variable compliance descriptors in order to comprehensively support compliance tasks. The advantage of this approach is that the impact of compliance on these different levels is tracked, thus enabling change propagation from changes in compliance requirements to infrastructure and business process reconfiguration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]