PaaSword’s vision is three-fold; i) maximize and fortify the trust of individual, professional and corporate customers to Cloud-enabled services and applications; ii) safeguard both corporate and personal sensitive data stored on Cloud infrastructures and Cloud-based storage services, and iii) enable the acceleration of Cloud computing technologies adoption and paradigm shift in the European industry. 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 ensure data protection, integrity and confidentiality, even in the case wherein there is no control over the underlying third-party Cloud resources utilised.