A streams manager determines which portions of a streaming application process sensitive data, and when performance of the streaming application needs to be increased, selects based on the sensitive data which portion(s) of the streaming application can be moved to a public cloud. The streams manager then interacts with the public cloud manager to move the selected portion(s) of the streaming application to the public cloud. This may include cloning of processing elements or operators to a public cloud, then splitting tuple attributes so tuple attributes that do not include sensitive data can be processed in the public cloud while tuple attributes that include sensitive data are processed in a secure system. The tuple attributes are then recombined into full tuples in the secure system. The streams manager thus protects the integrity of sensitive data while still taking advantage of the additional resources available in a public cloud.