Bitemporal Cloud Resource Compliance Across Provisioning Timelines
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing cloud-based enterprise network environments face challenges in managing resource provisioning and compliance due to reactive approaches that fail to scale with increasing resources and policies, leading to operational delays and errors from non-compliant deployments.
Innovation Solution
Implementing an immutable database for bitemporal analysis to perform pre-provisioning and post-provisioning checks using timelines, allowing for proactive compliance evaluation by generating current and alternate transaction states.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If reactive approaches are used to detect operational errors after resource deployment, then system simplicity is maintained, but compliance reliability deteriorates and operational delays occur
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements pre-provisioning compliance checks that evaluate resources against policies before they are deployed to the cloud environment. This preliminary action ensures compliance is verified in advance, preventing non-compliant resources from being provisioned and eliminating the need for post-deployment detection and correction, thereby improving compliance reliability while reducing operational delays
2Adaptability or versatility
If the number of resources and policies increases, then cloud footprint and scale improve, but system complexity increases and scalability deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates a copy of the current cloud environment state including resources and policies, then applies bitemporal analysis to this copied state to evaluate compliance without affecting the actual production environment. This allows comprehensive compliance checking of complex multi-resource environments without proportionally increasing system complexity, as the analysis operates on isolated copies rather than requiring complex coordination of all production systems
3Reliability
If pre-provisioning compliance checks are implemented, then compliance reliability improves, but processing time and system complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces complex mechanical compliance verification processes with bitemporal database analysis that automatically compares resource states across different time points and evaluates policy compliance through systematic temporal reasoning. This substitution of automated database-driven analysis for manual or complex procedural verification ensures comprehensive compliance checking while managing system complexity through standardized temporal query mechanisms
Data Source
AI summary
Embodiments disclosed are directed to ensuring resource compliance within a cloud-based environment. The embodiments include steps for performing both pre-provisioning and post-provisioning checks of resources, such as network protocols, prior to and after their deployment within the cloud-based environment. These steps include using bitemporal analysis to determine the impact of deploying resources within the environment through the use of multiple execution timelines where the impact of deploying a resource may be evaluated on an alternative timeline that does not change the current resource scope of the cloud-based environment. The analysis may further include tracking the impact of the resource after it has been deployed to ensure resource compliance.