Cloud Computing Towards Technological Convergence

With the popularization and improvement of social and industrial IT development, information appears to explosively increase, and people put much higher expectations on the services of computing, communication and network. Today’s public communication network is developing in the direction that networks are widely interconnected using communication network infrastructure as backbone and Internet protocols; at the same time, cloud computing, a computing paradigm in the ascendant, provides new service modes. Communication technology has the trend of developing towards computing technology and applications, and computing technology and applications have the trend of stepping towards service orientation architecture. Communication technology and information technology truly comes to a convergence. Telecom operators are planning to be providers of comprehensive information services in succession. To adopt cloud computing technology not only facilitates the upgrade of their communication network technology, service platform and supporting systems, but also facilitates the construction of the infrastructure and operating capacity of providing comprehensive information services. In this paper, the development processes of public communication network and computing are reviewed along with some new concepts for cloud computing.

Power Aware Meta Scheduler for Adaptive VM Provisioning in IaaS Cloud

Cloud Computing provides on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. The major issue lies in managing extremely large agile data centers which are generally over provisioned to handle unexpected workload surges. This paper focuses on green computing by introducing Power-Aware Meta Scheduler, which provides right fit infrastructure for launching virtual machines onto host. The major challenge of the scheduler is to make a wise decision in transitioning state of the processor cores by exploiting various power saving states inherent in the recent microprocessor technology. This is done by dynamically predicting the utilization of the cloud data center. The authors have extended existing cloudsim toolkit to model power aware resource provisioning, which includes generation of dynamic workload patterns, workload prediction and adaptive provisioning, dynamic lifecycle management of random workload, and implementation of power aware allocation policies and chip aware VM scheduler. The experimental results show that the appropriate usage of different power saving states guarantees significant energy conservation in handling stochastic nature of workload without compromising the performance, both when the data center is in low as well as moderate utilization.

Cloud Security Engineering

Information security is a key challenge in the Cloud because the data will be virtualized across different host machines, hosted on the Web. Cloud provides a channel to the service or platform in which it operates. However, the owners of data will be worried because their data and software are not under their control. In addition, the data owner may not recognize where data is geographically located at any particular time. So there is still a question mark over how data will be more secure if the owner does not control its data and software. Indeed, due to shortage of control over the Cloud infrastructure, use of ad-hoc security tools is not sufficient to protect the data in the Cloud; this paper discusses this security. Furthermore, a vision and strategy is proposed to mitigate or avoid the security threats in the Cloud. This broad vision is based on software engineering principles to secure the Cloud applications and services. In this vision, security is built into all phases of Service Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Platform Development Life Cycle (PDLC) or Infrastructure Development Life Cycle (IDLC).

The Financial Clouds Review

This paper demonstrates financial enterprise portability, which involves moving entire application services from desktops to clouds and between different clouds, and is transparent to users who can work as if on their familiar systems. To demonstrate portability, reviews for several financial models are studied, where Monte Carlo Methods (MCM) and Black Scholes Model (BSM) are chosen. A special technique in MCM, Least Square Methods, is used to reduce errors while performing accurate calculations. Simulations for MCM are performed on different types of Clouds. Benchmark and experimental results are presented for discussion. 3D Black Scholes are used to explain the impacts and added values for risk analysis. Implications for banking are also discussed, as well as ways to track risks in order to improve accuracy. A conceptual Cloud platform is used to explain the contributions in Financial Software as a Service (FSaaS) and the IBM Fined Grained Security Framework. This study demonstrates portability, speed, accuracy, and reliability of applications in the clouds, while demonstrating portability for FSaaS and the Cloud Computing Business Framework (CCBF).

Applying Security Policies in Small Business Utilizing Cloud Computing Technologies

Over a decade ago, cloud computing became an important topic for small and large businesses alike. The new concept promises scalability, security, cost reduction, portability, and availability. While addressing this issue over the past several years, there have been intensive discussions about the importance of cloud computing technologies. Therefore, this paper reviews the transition from traditional computing to cloud computing and the benefit for businesses, cloud computing architecture, cloud computing services classification, and deployment models. Furthermore, this paper discusses the security policies and types of internal risks that a small business might encounter implementing cloud computing technologies. It addresses initiatives towards employing certain types of security policies in small businesses implementing cloud computing technologies to encourage small business to migrate to cloud computing by portraying what is needed to secure their infrastructure using traditional security policies without the complexity used in large corporations.

Using Free Software for Elastic Web Hosting on a Private Cloud

Even though public cloud providers already exist and offer computing and storage services, cloud computing is still a buzzword for scientists in various fields such as engineering, finance, social sciences, etc. These technologies are currently mature enough to leave the experimental laboratory in order to be used in real-life scenarios. To this end, the authors consider that the prime example use case of cloud computing is a web hosting service. This paper presents the architectural approach as well as the technical solution for applying elastic web hosting onto a private cloud infrastructure using only free software. Through several available software applications and tools, anyone can build their own private cloud on top of a local infrastructure and benefit from the dynamicity and scalability provided by the cloud approach.

Fault Tolerant Architecture to Cloud Computing Using Adaptive Checkpoint

Cloud computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. Failures of any type are common in current datacenters, partly due to the number of nodes. Fault tolerance has become a major task for computer engineers and software developers because the occurrence of faults increases the cost of using resources and to meet the user expectations, the most fundamental user expectation is, of course, that his or her application correctly finishes independent of faults in the node. This paper proposes a fault tolerant architecture to Cloud Computing that uses an adaptive Checkpoint mechanism to assure that a task running can correctly finish in spite of faults in the nodes in which it is running. The proposed fault tolerant architecture is simultaneously transparent and scalable.

Custom-Made Cloud Enterprise Architecture for Small Medium and Micro Enterprises

Small, Medium, and Micro enterprises (SMMEs) usually do not have adequate funds to acquire ICT infrastructure and often use cloud computing. In this paper, the authors discuss the implementation of virtual enterprises (VE) to enable SMMEs to respond quickly to customers’ demands and market opportunities. The virtual enterprise model is based on the ability to create temporary co-operations and realize the value of a short term business opportunity that the partners cannot fully capture on their own. The model of virtual enterprise is made possible through virtualisation technology, which is a building block of cloud computing. To achieve a common goal, enterprises integrate resources, organisational models, and process models. Through the virtual business operating environment offered by cloud computing, the SMMEs are able to increase productivity and gain competitive advantage due to the cost benefit incurred. In this paper, the authors propose a virtual enterprise enabled cloud enterprise architecture based on the concept of virtual enterprise at both business and technology levels. The business level comprises of organisational models, process models, skills, and competences whereas the technology level comprises of IT resources.

Cloud Computing Applied for Numerical Study of Thermal Characteristics of SIP

Thermal management of integrated circuit (IC) and system-in-package (SIP) has gained importance as the power density and requirement for IC design have increased and need exists to analyse the heat dissipation performance characteristics of IC under use. In this paper, the authors examine the thermal characteristics of materials of IC. The authors leverage Cloud Computing architecture to remotely compute the dissipation performance parameters. Understanding thermal dissipation performance, which explains the thermal management of IC, is important for chip performance, as well as power and energy consumption in a chip or SIP. Using architectural understanding of Software as a Service (SaaS), the authors develop an efficient, fast, and secure simulation technique by leveraging control volume method (CVM) of linearization of relevant equations. Three chips are kept in tandem to make it a multi-chip module (MCM) to realise it as a smaller and lighter package. The findings of the study are presented for different dimensions of chips inside the package.

Security Issues in Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing (CC) is revolutionizing the methodology by which IT services are being utilized. It is being introduced and marketed with many attractive promises that are enticing to many companies and managers, such as reduced capital costs and relief from managing complex information technology infrastructure. However, along with desirable benefits come risks and security concerns that must be considered and addressed correctly. Thus, security issues must be considered as a major issue when considering Cloud Computing. This paper discusses Cloud Computing and its related concepts; highlights and categorizes many of the security issues introduced by the “cloud”; surveys the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities; and makes the necessary recommendations that can help promote the benefits and mitigate the risks associated with Cloud Computing.