Cloud Computing

Cloud computing technology is garnering success with marketing-based wisdom-like stories of savings, ease of use, and increased flexibility in controlling how resources are acquired at any given time to deliver computing capability. This chapter develops a preliminary decision framework to assist managers who are determining which cloud solution matches their specific requirements and evaluating the numerous commercial claims (in many cases unsubstantiated) of a cloud’s value. This decision framework is the result of the authors’ research program in understanding how small to medium-sized businesses can assess the potential benefit from cloud computing helps managers allocate investments and assess cloud alternatives that now compete with in-house data centers that previously stored, accessed, and processed data or with another company’s (outsourced) datacenter resources.

Requirements Engineering for Cloud Application Development

In industrial practice, cloud computing is becoming increasingly established as an option for formulating cost-efficient and needs-oriented information systems. Despite the increasing acceptance of cloud computing within the industry, many fundamental questions remain unanswered, or are answered only partially. Besides issues relating to the best architectures, legal issues, and pricing models, suppliers of cloud-based solutions are faced with the issue of appropriate requirements engineering. This means eliciting optimal understanding of the customer’s requirements and implementing this into appropriate requirements of the solution to be realised. This chapter examines selected, established requirements engineering methods in order to study the extent to which they can be applied to the specific requirements of cloud-based solutions. Furthermore, it develops a comparison framework containing the features of cloud computing. This comparison framework is applied to four established process models for requirements engineering. Recommendations for a requirements engineering process adapted to cloud computing are derived.

Managing the Cloud for Information Systems Agility

Change is endemic in modern business competition. In an age of globalization, with the rapid development of Internet technologies, changes occur at a much faster pace, and are also more unpredictable. Being agile in a turbulent environment has been ranked highly by executives in surveys of business issues conducted in past five years. Today nearly all organizations rely on information systems (IS) to operate. Agility in IS is critical in achieving overall agility in business. However, despite the interest from the practitioner community, IS agility (sometimes termed IT agility) in academia has received limited recognition and represents an under-researched area. The recent adoption of cloud computing services has presented a major change in the way IS are delivered, in the hope of creating more agile and responsive IS. However, whether or not cloud computing, as promised by the providers, increases IS agility, is still unclear. This research aims at providing a conceptualization of IS agility based on research to date, and examining how cloud computing might facilitate such agility. Based on a literature review, cloud computing services (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) are analyzed against multiple aspects of IS agility. Only IaaS is found to have the potential providing consistent agility, whereas agility at PaaS and SaaS levels is more determined by human/organization factors. Lastly, suggestions for businesses and directions to future research are proposed.

Cloud Computing Terms, Definitions, and Taxonomy

Cloud computing has taken the IT industry by storm. It has ushered a new era of computing and IT delivery model. This chapter introduces terms and terminologies associated with cloud computing from a vendor neutral perspective. Readers are gradually introduced to cloud computing elements which pave the way for better understanding in later chapters.

Patterns of Tactical Networking Services

This chapter describes findings and prototypes of emerging tactical networking services, which were identifiable based on unique experimental studies of tactical networking. The described findings would be helpful in structuring tactical cloud services for the variety manned-unmanned sensor networking applications.

Security in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has recently emerged in prominence and is being rapidly adopted by organizations because of its potential and perceived benefits of flexibility and affordability. According to surveys conducted in 2008 and 2009 by International Data Corporation (IDC) of IT executives and CIOs, security was cited as the top concern for the adoption of cloud computing. Enterprises that plan to utilize cloud services for their infrastructure, platform, and/or software needs must understand the security risks and privacy issues related to cloud computing. This chapter discusses the technical, legal, and policy/organizational security risks of cloud computing, and reviews recommendations/strategies for managing and mitigating security threats in cloud computing. It also presents vendor-specific solutions and strategies that cloud service providers are implementing for mitigating security risks in cloud computing.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS, short for Software-as-a-Service, is quickly becoming the dominant approach for software delivery as a Web-based service. It is a software deployment model in which an enterprise application is delivered and managed as a service by a software vender to simultaneously meet the needs of multiple customers. By enabling remote access to software and its associated functions, SaaS allows organizations and individuals to access business and commercial functionality at a cost typically less than paying for licensed applications. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the origin and evolution of SaaS, as well as to describe its roll in today’s enterprise environment. This chapter begins with a description of the evolution of SaaS, followed by the architecture, implementation, and associated business model.

Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure as a Service is the pillar on which a cloud computing architecture is built. With the advancement of technologies in communications, computing, and storage devices, IaaS has emerged as a highly efficient platform to construct SaaS and PaaS layer on top of it. IaaS solutions vary from an organization to another. One single solution does not fit all. This chapter looks at the general constituents of IaaS.

Cloud Computing

In a cloud ecosystem, most of the data and software that users use reside on the remote server(s), which brings some new challenges for the system, especially security and privacy. At present, these security threats and attacks are the greatest concern for the service providers towards delivering a more secure cloud infrastructure. One of the major concerns is data security, implemented by the most effective means possible and the protection of stored data from unauthorized users and hackers. When considering these security issues, trust is one of the most important means to improve the system’s security and enable interoperability of current heterogeneous cloud computing platforms. The objective of this chapter is to discuss and understand the basic security and privacy challenges of a cloud computing environment as the security of cloud computing is the greatest challenge for delivering a safer cloud environment for both the service providers and the service customers. With this in mind, this chapter will introduce the risks and possible attacks in a cloud computing environment. The major goal is to specify the security risks and attacks and consider trust of cloud service users for delivering a safer and innovation business model.

Holistic Investment Framework for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a new technology which puts whole or partial parts of the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure and services in a virtualized environment inside and/or outside the traditional IT center perimeter. It touches every level of the IT architecture and thus has a big influence on the way the internal and external users via their business processes are interacting with this architecture. Security is a big issue in this context and a lot of business and IT people are reluctant to move to the Cloud. Besides the security, business and architectural issues may increase the risks and create more uncertainties for these kinds of projects. For this reason, the chapter presents an investment framework, which takes into account the global, the business, the IT and the operational strategies, so that cloud computing projects have more chance to succeed. The need for flexibility in the investments is addressed by the real option valuation, which is placed in the context of the chapter’s holistic investment framework for cloud computing.