The vision of PaaSword is to maximize and fortify the trust of individual, professional and corporate customers to Cloud -enabled services and applications, to safeguard both corporate and personal sensitive data stored on Cloud infrastructures and Cloud-based storage services, and to accelerate the adoption of Cloud computing technologies and paradigm shift from the European industry. Thus, PaaSword will introduce a holistic data privacy and security by design framework enhanced by sophisticated context-aware policy access models and robust policy access, decision, enforcement and governance mechanisms, which will enable the implementation of secure and transparent Cloud-based applications and services that will maintain a fully distributed and totally encrypted data persistence layer, and, thus, will foster customers' data protection, integrity and confidentiality, even in the case wherein there is no control over the underlying third-party Cloud resources utilized. In particular, PaaSword intends not only to adopt the CSA Cloud security principles, but also to extend them by capitalizing on recent innovations on (a) distributed encryption and virtual database middleware technologies that introduce a scalable secure Cloud database abstraction layer combined with sophisticated distribution and encryption methods into the processing and querying of data stored in the Cloud; (b) context-aware access control that incorporate the dynamically changing contextual information into novel group policies implementing configurable context-based access control policies and context-dependent access rights to the stored data at various different levels; and (c) policy governance, modelling and annotation techniques that allows application developers to specify an appropriate level of protection for the application’s data, while the evaluation of whether an incoming request should be granted access to the target data takes dynamically place during application runtime.

MELODIC will enable data-intensive applications to run within defined security, cost, and performance boundaries seamlessly on geographically distributed and federated cloud infrastructures. Serving the user’s needs and constraints, MELODIC will realise the potential of Cloud computing for big data and data-intensive applications by transparently taking advantage of distinct characteristics of available private and public clouds, dynamically optimise resource utilisation, consider data locality, conform to the user’s privacy needs and service requirements, and counter vendor lock-in. These benefits are achieved by integrating and extending the results and the open source platforms available from three major European Cloud projects with the Hadoop and Spark big data frameworks: The PaaSage platform will be used for intelligent and autonomic cross-cloud deployment and is extended with data aware modelling and deployment configuration reasoning; the CACTOS platform is extended with support for Hadoop and Spark in cross-Cloud application deployment and management; and the PaaSword platform will ensure unified data security and cross-Cloud privacy. MELODIC will integrate with the existing open source development teams for these platforms and the contributions will be released back to the used platforms as open source. The integrated MELODIC platform will be maintained and exploited by a professional software house, and tested in several demanding real world applications: scalable Customer Relationship Management, real-time optimised traffic routing, and fast and scalable processing of genomic data.