Analysis of Different SaaS Architectures from a Trust Service Provider Perspective

Abstract

The topic of cloud computing is becoming of extreme interest for trust service providers willing to move their services from a desktop-oriented approach into a more interconnected, mobile world. In our paper, we investigate and present from this perspective, several architectures that are currently available on the commercial market. The analysis covers some of the well-known commercial cloud platforms available: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud. We have analyzed and identified several advantages associated with the use of these commercially available platforms with the objective of pondering the potential use of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach within an innovative Digital Enterprise making use of the traditional services of a trust service provider (including here digital signatures, digital notary, time stamping, etc.) The analysis of the above-mentioned commercial platforms is not only addressing their own intrinsic SaaS architectures but also the derived or personalized architectures that are provided for their tenants and clients.