We discuss the concept of information stewardship in cloud-based business ecosystems. The constituent concepts of stewardship -- which we believe will be crucial to the successful development of cloud-based business of all kinds -- extend those of security to encompass concepts of objectives, ethics/values, sustainability, and resilience: all familiar from the stewardship of natural resources. Our view is based on rigorous approaches from mathematical systems modelling and economics, and is informed by concepts from natural resource management and information assurance.

Digital information is increasingly more and more important to enable interactions and transactions on the Internet. On the other hand, leakages of sensitive information can have harmful effects for people, enterprises and governments.This paper focuses on the problems of dealing with timed release of confidential information and simplifying its access once public: it is a common issue in the industry, government and day-to-day life.We introduce the "HP Time Vault Service", based on the emerging Identifier-based Encryption (IBE) cryptography schema. IBE (public) encryption keys specify the disclosure time. These keys are used to encrypt confidential information. An independent time server generates and publishes IBE decryption keys correspondent to the current time, at predefined intervals.We discuss the advantages of this approach against current approaches based on traditional cryptography. A web-service based prototype is described, as a proof of concept.

Recent IT attacks demonstrated how vulnerable consumers and enterprises are when adopting commercial and widely deployed operating systems, software applications and solutions. Diversity in software applications is fundamental to increase chances of survivability to faults and attacks. Current approaches to diversity are mainly based on the development of multiple versions of the same software, their parallel execution and the usage of voting mechanisms. Because of the high cost, they are used mainly for very critical and special cases. We introduce and discuss an alternative method to ensure diversity for common widespread software applications without requiring additional resources. We describe a few encouraging results obtained from simulations.