BPC4MSA: A Microservices-Based Framework for Business Process Compliance in Cloud Environments

The increasing adoption of Microservices Architecture (MSA) and Cloud Computing offers significant agility but introduces substantial challenges for traditional Business Process Compliance (BPC). This paper addresses these challenges using a Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM). We identify persistent research gaps, including a “Broken Feedback Loop” between design-time and runtime systems. To address these gaps, we present BPC4MSA, a cloud-native framework for holistic BPC management spanning the full lifecycle—from design-time verification to resilient, asynchronous runtime auditing—derived from systematic requirements analysis. This work’s primary contribution is the BPC4MSA framework, a novel conceptual artifact whose design theoretically addresses these gaps. We evaluate this design via a dual-method approach: first, a Systematic Literature Review confirms the framework’s conceptual novelty against the state-of-the-art. Second, a preliminary empirical study of a runtime prototype component is conducted not as a performance benchmark, but as a feasibility check. This check confirms the expected architectural trade-offs of its event-driven pattern, validating its suitability for asynchronous auditing use cases and highlighting critical implementation challenges, such as consumer scaling.