Forecasting the Trends in Cloud Computing and its Impact on Future IT Business

Cloud computing has become the cutting-edge technology for information technology processing and high-end computational tasks. Cloud has started playing its part in almost all business processes. Big data in cloud has become the buzzword. The business impact of cloud has deepened with the growth of big data analytics. Current trends such as green cloud computing, mobile cloud computing, and big data have created social as well as business impact. In this chapter, the authors analyze the field of cloud computing and perform an intense literature survey augmented with mathematical analysis. The forecast on the future of cloud and analysis of the current trends shows that cloud computing is a promising technology that will evolve further in years to come.

Mobile and Cloud Technologies for Smarter Governance

There are hordes of data-driven, context-aware, and people-centric applications and services for smarter environments such as smarter homes, governments, buildings, cities, and organizations. With the exponential growth of smart phones, there are service repositories and application stores in remote mobile clouds. Similarly, with the ceaseless advancements in the device ecosystem and in the IT field, government-specific applications will flourish and be deployed and maintained in special cloud stores, platforms, and infrastructures to be found, bound, and used by any input/output devices for a variety of everyday personal and professional purposes. Smart, sustainable, intuitive, and citizen-aware services can be dynamically created from the ground up as well as orchestrated or choreographed out of multiple atomic and discrete software services. Such composite services are directly fulfilling government activities. Thus, clouds emerge as the most common and minimum requirement for not only producing and stocking services but also for hosting application platforms. Further, clouds facilitate provisioning and renting out their configurable and customizable assets on demand. Through self-service portals, the cloud usage is to pick up fast in the days to unfold. In this chapter, the authors write about how cloud adoption is to ring in delectable transformations for worldwide governments as well as their citizens, that is, how governments can accomplish more with less, how people can experience high quality, technology-sponsored digital living, how the cloud idea becomes a centre of attraction for more ingenuity towards newer and nimbler service conceptualization, concretization, and delivery.

The Cloud Inside the Network

The access infrastructure to the cloud is usually a major drawback that limits the uptake of cloud services. Attention has turned to rethinking a new architectural deployment of the overall cloud service delivery. In this chapter, the authors argue that it is not sufficient to integrate the cloud domain with the operator's network domain based on the current models. They envision a full integration of cloud and network, where cloud resources are no longer confined to a data center but are spread throughout the network and owned by the network operator. In such an environment, challenges arise at different levels, such as in resource management, where both cloud and network resources need to be managed in an integrated approach. The authors particularly address the resource allocation problem through joint virtualization of network and cloud resources by studying and comparing an Integer Linear Programming formulation and a heuristic algorithm.

The Economics of Cloud Computing

This chapter examines the economic impact of the diffusion of a new technology as cloud computing. This will allow firms to rent computing power and storage from service providers, and to pay on demand, with a profound impact on the cost structure of all the industries, turning some of the fixed costs in marginal costs of production. Such a change will have a substantial impact on the incentives to create new business, and through this, on: investments and macroeconomic growth, job creation in all industries and job reallocation in the ICT sector, and public finance accounts, through the direct impact on the public sector spending and the indirect one on the tax revenues. In this study, the author investigates the consequences of the diffusion of cloud computing on market structures and competition and tries to disentangle the above mentioned aspects with a particular focus on a simulation run for the European economy.

Seizing Electronic Evidence from Cloud Computing Environments

Despite a growing adoption of cloud computing, law enforcement and the judicial system are unprepared to prosecute cloud-based crimes. This chapter illuminates legal problems in the United States for electronic discovery and digital forensics arising from cloud computing and argues that cloud computing challenges the process and product of electronic discovery. The researchers investigate how to obtain forensic evidence from cloud computing using the legal process by surveying the existing statues and recent cases applicable to cloud forensics. A hypothetical case study of child pornography being hosted in the Cloud illustrates the difficulty in acquiring evidence for cloud-related crimes. For the first time, a sample search warrant is presented that could be used in this case study, and which provides sample language for agents and prosecutors who wish to obtain a warrant authorizing the search and seizure of data from cloud computing environments. The chapter concludes by taking a contrasting view and discusses how defense attorneys might be able to challenge cloud-derived evidence in court.

Securing Business IT on the Cloud

In this chapter, the author examines the various approaches taken by the popular cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google App Engine (GAE), and Windows Azure (Azure) to secure the cloud. AWS offers Infrastructure as a Service model, GAE is representative of the Software as a Service, and Azure represents the Platform as a Service model. Irrespective of the model, a cloud provider offers a variety of services from a simple large-scale storage service to a complete infrastructure for supporting the operations of a modern business. The author discusses some of the security aspects that a cloud customer must be aware of in selecting a cloud service provider for their needs. This discussion includes the major threats posed by multi-tenancy in the cloud. Another important aspect to consider in the security context is machine virtualization. Securing these services involves a whole range of measures from access-point protection at the client end to securing virtual co-tenants on the same physical machine hosted by a cloud. In this chapter, the author highlights the major offerings of the three cloud service providers mentioned above. She discusses the details of some important security challenges and solutions and illustrates them using screen shots of representative security configurations.

Accelerating Mobile-Cloud Computing

With the recent advances in cloud computing and the capabilities of mobile devices, the state-of-the-art of mobile computing is at an inflection point, where compute-intensive applications can now run on today's mobile devices with limited computational capabilities. This is achieved by using the communications capabilities of mobile devices to establish high-speed connections to vast computational resources located in the cloud. While the execution scheme based on this mobile-cloud collaboration opens the door to many applications that can tolerate response times on the order of seconds and minutes, it proves to be an inadequate platform for running applications demanding real-time response within a fraction of a second. In this chapter, the authors describe the state-of-the-art in mobile-cloud computing as well as the challenges faced by traditional approaches in terms of their latency and energy efficiency. They also introduce the use of cloudlets as an approach for extending the utility of mobile-cloud computing by providing compute and storage resources accessible at the edge of the network, both for end processing of applications as well as for managing the distribution of applications to other distributed compute resources.

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.

Risk Management in the Cloud and Cloud Outages

Cloud computing is facilitated often through the open Internet, which is not designed for secure communications. From the cloud user perspective, access to the cloud through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a possibility, but this is not the default access method for all cloud users. Given this reality, the cloud service users must be prepared for risk management because they do not control the cloud hardware or the communication channels. Added to this uncertainty is the potential for cloud service outage for risk management planning. In this chapter, the authors discuss the various aspects of risk management from the cloud user perspective. In addition, they analyze some of the major cloud outages over the past five years that have resulted in loss of trust. This list includes the outages in Amazon Web Services, Google, Windows, and Rackspace.

Mobile Cloud Computing and Its Security and Privacy Challenges

Mobile cloud computing has grown out of two hot technology trends, mobility and cloud. The emergence of cloud computing and its extension into the mobile domain creates the potential for a global, interconnected mobile cloud computing environment that will allow the entire mobile ecosystem to enrich their services across multiple networks. We can utilize significant optimization and increased operating power offered by cloud computing to enable seamless and transparent use of cloud resources to extend the capability of resource constrained mobile devices. However, in order to realize mobile cloud computing, we need to develop mechanisms to achieve interoperability among heterogeneous and distributed devices. We need solutions to discover best available resources in the cloud servers based on the user demands and approaches to deliver desired resources and services efficiently and in a timely fashion to the mobile terminals. Furthermore, while mobile cloud computing has tremendous potential to enable the mobile terminals to have access to powerful and reliable computing resources anywhere and anytime, we must consider several issues including privacy and security, and reliability in realizing mobile cloud computing. In this chapter, the authors first explore the architectural components required to realize a mobile cloud computing infrastructure. They then discuss mobile cloud computing features with their unique privacy and security implications. They present unique issues of mobile cloud computing that exacerbate privacy and security challenges. They also discuss various approaches to address these challenges and explore the future work needed to provide a trustworthy mobile cloud computing environment.